THE SOUL'S EXODUS 



AND 



PILGRIMAGE, 



THE SOUL'S EXODUS 



AND 



PILGRIMAGE. 



BY 



JAMES BALDWIN BROWN. B.l, 



MINISTER OF CLA VLAND S CHAPEL, CLAPHAM ROAD, LONDON. 
"thb way of th;-: WILDERNESS."— EXOTJUs Xiii. IS. 

SECOND EDITION. 

- - 

LONDON: 

SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 



M.DCCC.LXII. 






\The right of Translation is reserved.'] 



/ 




CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Sermon i.—The Bondage . . . . . 1 

" The land of Egypt : the house of bondage." — Exod. xx. 2. 



i&entum it— The Exodus (lit. "way-out ") . . 28 

" Out of Egypt have I called my Son." — Matt. ii. 15. 

ioenttOtt Uu— The Way of the Wilderness . . 58 

" But God led the people about, through the way of the wil- 
derness of the Red Sea" — Exod. xiii. 18. 

Sermon tb»— The bitter Waters of Mar ah. . 81 

" 5*0 Moses brought Israel from the Red Sea; and they went 
out into the wilderness of Shur ; and they went three 
days into the wilderness, and found no water. And 
when they came to Marah, they could not drink of the 
waters of Marah, for they were bitter." — Exod. xv. 
22, 23. 



Vlll CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

ioeWttOtt b. — The Springs and the Palm-trees of 

Elim . . .104 

" And they came to Elim, where were tivelve wells of water, 
and threescore and ten palm-trees, and they encamped 
there by the waters" — Exod. xv. 27. 



Senium bt. — The Bread of the Wilderness. — 

Exod. xvi 131 

" He fed thee with manna (which thou knewest not, neither 
did thy fathers know), that He might make thee know 
that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word 
that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man 
live." — Deut. viii. 3. 



Swttton bit. — Sinai. The Revelation of the Divine 

Name. — Exod. xix. . . . . .154 

" I am the Lord thy God."—Exod. xx. 2. 



Swmon bttt.— Sinai. The Golden Calf. The 

essential Nature of Idolatry. — Exod.xxxi. 178 

" Up, make us gods which shall go before us." — Exod. xxxii. 1. 



SettttOtt tX. — Sinai. The Dispensation of Law. 

—Exod. xx 202 

" And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear 
the Lord our God, for our good always." — Deut. vi. 24. 



Sermon X. — The Gospel under the Law. . . 228 

" And thou shalt put the mercy-seat above upon the ark ; and 
in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that L shall give 
thee." — Exod. xxv. 21. 



CONTENTS. IX 



gwmott XL — The Divine Presence. Alone : yet 

not alone. ...... 255 

"And He said, My presence shall go with thee, and J wilt 
give thee rest."— Exod. xxxiii. 14. 

J&etmon XiL — Kibroth-hattaavah. The Graves 

of Lust 279 

" And he called the name of that place Kibroth-hattaavah ; 
because there they buried the people that lusted" — 
Numb. xi. 34. 

iJfnttOn Xttt. — The Wanderings. The common 

Levels of Life 306 

" And thou shalt remember ail the way which the Lord thy 
God led thee these forty years in the wilderness.''- — 
Deut. viii. 2. 

SetttlQtt Stb* — Pisgah. The Visions . . . 334 

" And Moses went up from the plains of Moab into the 
mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over 
against Jericho. And the Lord shewed him all the 
land." — Deut. xxxir. 1. 



Sutton £b. — Canaan. The good Land that is 

beyond Jordan 361 

" The good land that is beyond Jordan." — Deut. iii. 25. 

Senium xbu — Canaan. The everlasting Joy. . 392 

" Everlasting joy shall be unto them." — Isa. lxi. 7. 



a — 5 



PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 



In sending forth a second edition of " The SouTs 
Exodus and Pilgrimage" I should be ungrateful 
indeed, if I did not express my very warm sense 
of the cordiality with which it has been noticed 
by the critics of the press, and received by the 
public at large ; if I may form an estimate from 
the fact that a new edition has been called for 
so soon. 

There is but one point in the criticisms which 
have fallen under my notice which seems to me 
to need a word of explanation. A friendly critic 
mixes with many warm encomiums a complaint 
that I have omitted all reference to the Passover 
in connection with the Exodus. He is right in 
supposing that the omission was purposed. What 
the Passover seemed to mean to the Israelites 
that night, is one thing; what it means to us, 
who can look at it in the light of God's sub- 



Xll PREFACE. 



sequent revelations of Himself, is another. I 
could not have referred to it in its place without 
entering on a discussion of theological tenets 
which would have been premature ; which would 
not only have interrupted the moral continuity 
of the narrative, but would have anticipated the 
period in the history of the education of the 
people, when these truths were formally pre- 
sented to their minds by the Lord. It seems 
to me much more true to the method of the 
Book of Exodus to deal with these portions of 
the subject as I have done, as a whole, in con- 
nection with that which gives to them their full 
significance — the Dispensation of the Law. 

With this one explanation of a matter wherein 
my method might, without explanation, be easily 
misunderstood, I send forth this new edition of 
my book, with an earnest hope that God may 
make it the means of arousing some who are 
" in captivity " to attempt the Exodus, and of 
helping them to bear themselves Christianly 
through the pilgrimage of life. 

April 4th, 1862. 



PEEEACE. 



To the Members of the Congregation 
of Clayland's Chapel. 

My dear Friends, 

It is to you first, and through you to a 
wider congregation, that I offer these thoughts 
on a Soul's Exodus and Pilgrimage, as illus- 
trated by that way of the wilderness through 
which of old God led His sons. You are fully 
familiar with my conviction, that we have been 
in some danger of slighting the instruction and 
influence which the records of the Old Dispensa- 
tion are capable of affording to us, and which 
unfold to us the way of God for nearly two thou- 
sand years in the education of mankind. I believe 
that every man, in a measure, repeats in his own 
experience the experience of the race ; that in 
a sense we all live through the stages through 
which the world has lived ; and that the records 
of God's methods with the world in any age of 
its history, have not merely speculative but prac- 



XIV PREFACE. 



tical and personal bearings on us all. And I 
think, too, that, on a wider scale, it will help us 
not a little to understand the revelation which 
God has given to us in His Son, if we trace 
back His course of preparation for the fulness of 
times, His education of the world for the light 
and freedom which it now enjoys. Those will 
see most in Christ, and will comprehend best 
what " the adoption of a son " may mean, who 
trace most reverently the steps by which God 
unfolded the revelation, and educated men to 
receive all the fulness which it contains. 

I confess that I hear with a strange shrinking 
of spirit, the notions about the Old Testament 
which some of the more advanced even of our 
orthodox teachers and writers put forth, as 
though the less we studied it the better ; as 
though it were the record of some palaeozoic age 
of human development, cut off utterly from any 
vital communion with us — belonging, in fact, to 
a period and stage of human culture and intelli- 
gence which we, in our enlightened age, do right 
to scorn. Unhappy the nation where childhood 
is not beautiful, and is lightly esteemed. And 
unhappy the Church which has no eye of reve- 
rence to bend on the childhood of humanity — 
which feels itself far removed from those per- 
plexities and perils with which adolescence is 



PREFACE. XV 



familiar, and regards the record of them as meet 
pabulum for weaklings, and such as love to dote 
about the past. We are all of us too much 
children to be able to despise the history of 
God's education of the world's childhood ; nor 
can I afford to close my Old Testament, while 
the Christian repeats so constantly the expe- 
rience, sufferings, and sins of the old Jewish 
world. 

I think that there is a growing reaction 
against that tendency to depreciate the old, 
which is so characteristic of all radical schools, 
political, intellectual, and Christian. I think 
that Mr. Maurice's " Prophets and Kings of the 
Old Testament" did much to promote the reaction 
in the province with which we have here to do. 
I remember reading it many years ago with deep 
interest, and being led by it to consider more 
thoughtfully, whether I had fairly appreciated 
the significance of the Old Testament in relation 
to the New. I have always endeavoured to study 
the Old Testament in the light which the New 
sheds upon it, being fully convinced — in spite of 
a marvellous argument to the contrary in some 
" Strictures" upon my "Divine Life in Man' — 
that that which is typical must be essentially 
smaller and narrower than the thing typified, and 
cannot therefore explain it, but must be explained 



XVI PREFACE. 



by it, while it reflects a rich light upon it, as 
revealing the method in which the way for it was 
prepared by God. 

If there be any part of the Old Testament 
which is of the widest and grandest human 
interest, surely it is the way of the wilderness, 
which I have taken as the text of this present 
book. It is human from beginning to end. It 
is this universal human interest which I have 
endeavoured to elicit; that it is there, — that I do 
not put it into, but draw it out of the narrative, — 
I hope my book will show. We have here a 
complete inspired history of a great human pro- 
gress. The education of a people who had been 
bondmen, to be the freemen of God, and His 
elect ministers to the world ; a ministry which 
the nation refused, but which such men as Daniel 
and, in a far higher form, St. Paul, fulfilled. 
I am sure, then, that we must have here a com- 
plete picture of a human pilgrimage from the 
bondage into which sin has sunk us, to the free- 
man's home for which God is seeking to educate 
us by His Gospel. I am sure that a whole Chris- 
tian philosophy of life is here, looking back upon 
it in the light of the great principle of the 
Apostle, that the angel who was with the Church 
in the wilderness, was the Lord who is " God 
with us." 



PREFACE. XV11 



But I have not attempted to present any- 
thing like a complete philosophy of life in these 
pages. Many may feel disposed to complain of 
the absence of formal symmetry in the treatment 
of the subject, of the stations omitted, and of 
the want of a blending of the picture of our 
human pilgrimage into one harmonious whole. 
I should plead guilty to the charge without 
shame. I have not attempted to interpret every- 
thing, because I do not understand everything. 
I have not attempted to make a complete 
methodical picture of man's pilgrimage on this 
basis, because I am sure that such a picture would 
be the more incomplete for the very appearance 
of completeness which it might wear. I do not 
comprehend God's whole thought about man and 
man's life. I see here a little and there a little, 
assured that what is most essential is brought 
out by our heavenly Teacher into the clearest 
daylight. What I see, I have set down, but I 
have not attempted to dogmatize where I do not 
see, under the idea of making my book on our 
pilgrimage more complete. 

I can fancy, too, that some may complain of 
an uncertainty of utterance as to the precise 
spiritual character of the nation, and what God 
intends it spiritually to illustrate. Now, I speak 
of the glory of the dispensation, and now, of its 



XV 111 PREFACE. 



darkness ; now, of the people as God's chosen 
ones — His sons beloved, cherished, and elect to 
Canaan — and now, as faithless, slavish, denounced 
and disowned by Him. I can only answer, that I 
find this formal inconsistency in the Book, and 
that I have tried to be faithful to it ; and that 
such uncertainties and apparent inconsistencies 
must inhere, in any faithful attempt to set forth 
the truth of Divine things within the range of 
our comprehension ; that St. Paul's writings are 
full of them ; that I should distrust deeply the 
man who should profess his ability to clear up 
all difficulties, and explain precisely what God 
means by every act and word ; and finally, that 
to those who will look honestly, the counterpart 
of these inconsistencies and uncertainties, and in 
some measure the key to them, is within. 

I have spoken of the Jewish dispensation as 
having its own essential glory. With St. Paul's 
words before me, I could do no otherwise. In 
2 Cor. iii. he says distinctly, that it was 
glorious ; no prison-house for bondmen, but a 
training-school for sons. I have endeavoured to 
recall that glory, while showing how in the 
glory that excelleth, it is not abolished, but 
absorbed, and thus more nobly lost. 

It will be seen that this is mainly a book of 
experience. I have not sought to unfold doc- 



PREFACE. XIX 



trines ; not because I undervalue their impor- 
tance, but because they are among the things 
which are most surely believed in our churches ; 
and the great need amongst us is to have them 
married to life. I have assumed, without 
lengthened proof, that the Jehovah of the Old 
Testament is the " Emmanuel " of the New ; 
and that, as St. Stephen testifies, the Spirit of 
the Lord who strove against their sins, and 
educated their souls, was the Holy Ghost. I 
have adopted the thoughts and phraseology 
of the New Testament, as matter of course ; 
believing that in doing so I am doing precisely 
what a believing Israelite would have delighted 
to do, had he enjoyed our fuller knowledge of 
the things of God — the fact of the Incarnation, 
and the mission of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter 
and Quickener of men. 

My readers will see that I avail myself of the 
works of Oriental travellers for the purpose of 
illustrating the scenery of the wilderness way. 
I had published the syllabus of the series of 
Discourses which I now give to the public, and 
had preached some of the earlier ones, before 
Dr. Stanley's masterly work on " Sinai and Pales- 
tine " appeared. I read it with intense interest, 
and was delighted to find how amply his descrip- 
tions confirmed the views, which I had been led 



XX PREFACE. 



to entertain as to the fitness of the wilderness 
of Sinai to be the scene of the education of a 
noble race. I know how hard it is to bring 
a fresh eye to bear on scenes oft described, and 
about which a stereotyped impression is abroad. 
This rare merit attaches to Dr. Stanley's work. 
It is evidently a fresh and faithful record of the 
impressions of a man whose eye may be trusted, 
and is invaluable to those who, like myself, 
endeavour to comprehend and set forth the 
reasons why by that way God led His sons. 

And now, my dear friends, I commend my 
book to your thoughtful perusal, and myself to 
your sympathies and prayers. I never cease 
to give thanks for the cordial sympathy and 
co-operation which, for fifteen years, you have 
afforded to me ; and for the zeal — never more 
conspicuous than at present, with which you 
sustain my efforts to instruct, comfort, help, 
and bless the poor of the neighbourhood, to 
whom we, in common with other Christian 
congregations, are set to be as " the salt of 
the earth," and " the light of the world." 

150, Albany Street, Regent's Park, 
December 3rd, 1861. 



THE SOUL'S EXODUS 

AND 

PILGRIMAGE. 



The Land of Egypt : the House of Bondage. 

Exodus xs. 2. 

Egypt stands foremost among the countries of 
the elder pagan world. Egypt is, in truth, the 
mother of paganism, the fruitful parent of idola- 
tries, the nurse of pagan civilization, of pagan 
literature, politics, and art; and therefore the 
fitting representative in the language of Scripture 
of that " world" out of which, in all ages, God 
calls His sons. 

Let us first study the physical aspects of the 
country. The plains of the Nile, the Euphrates, 
the Ganges, theHoang-ho, bear indisputable marks 
of having been the earliest settled homes of the 
human race. In these vast valleys, under the fos- 

1 



THE LAND OF EGYPT 



tering warmth of an almost tropical sun, agricul- 
ture was at once simple and productive; bodies 
of men could be nourished readily, and society — 
using the word in a popular sense, the aggrega- 
tion of masses of men around common centres — 
became easily possible. The soil of these alluvial 
plains is of the richest, and is cheaply renewed by 
inundation. Egypt has never been manured for 
four thousand years, and is as fruitful now as in 
the days of Sesostris. The means of communi- 
cation, moreover, are in such countries easy and 
rapid; and the apparatus of a complicated social 
system can be set up with less toil and cost than 
in those varied and temperate regions which are 
fitted to develop the higher faculties of man, and 
to be the home of civilization at a more advanced 
era of its history. The early settlers in the valleys 
of Mesopotamia and Egypt attained very rapidly 
to an advanced stage of social and political deve- 
lopment. While the Hebrew patriarchs were still 
feeding their flocks on the wolds of Canaan, and 
struggling with the inhabitants for no greater 
matter than a well, Egypt had a settled and com- 
plicated polity, castes of labourers, soldiers, and 
priests, a hierarchy, a court of great ceremonial 
pomp, and commercial relations with the most 
distant nations of the world. 

At an equally early period Mesopotamia became 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 3 

the seat of a powerful and splendid monarchy, 
whose earliest records are being disinterred from 
the sand-hills which, like the monasteries of the 
middle ages, guard treasures of which they little 
know the worth. These records show the exceed- 
ing rapidity of the growth of civilization under 
the propitious circumstances at which we have 
glanced. If, as has been suggested, the name 
Peleg, Gen. x. 25 (division), marks the period 
of the canalization of Mesopotamia, it shows what 
rapid progress had been made in that region in 
the time of the great-grandson of Shem.* 

But such civilization is not fruitful in true pro- 
gress. Though rich, it is stagnant, like the cli- 
mate and the land. In such wealthy regions, 
where nature is so lavish and her smile is to be 
had for asking, man misses the stimulus to action, 
and that play of his nobler qualities and passions 
which the more thrifty temperament of nature in 
a colder climate and more broken country secures. 
If you want to see man in his individual man- 
hood, full-grown, free, noble, and productive of 
his highest works, you must seek the colder and 
more varied European Continent. If you want to 
see men living in herds, springing up and perish- 
ing like the crops of summer fruits, preserving 
unchanged characteristics of form, feature, and 

* Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 1856. 

1—2 



THE LAND OF EGYPT 



habit, without progress, without regress, through 
thousands of years, you must go to the basins of 
the Euphrates, the Ganges, and the Nile. The 
fellah of Egypt lives still, uncomplaining and 
hopeless, the life of his oppressed forefathers in 
the days of the Pharaohs, while the whole Western 
world has been in rapid progress, and has left all 
undent landmarks, even the loftiest, hull-down in 
her wake. 

Of the four regions which dispute the palm of 
antiquity and contend for the name of Mother of 
Civilization, Egypt stands first in interest and 
importance, as the wisest, the most developed, 
and, above all, the most influential on the civi- 
lization of Europe and the fortunes of mankind. 
From Egypt were carried the seeds which, re- 
ceived into the generous soil of the Greek nature, 
bore as their fruit the completest form of pagan 
society ; and in Egypt was nursed and educated 
that intellect, which, receiving a diviner wisdom 
from on high, gave birth to the social and national 
institutions which have unfolded out of their 
bosom the Christian Church. Thus the two great 
streams of human progress had their starting- 
point from Egypt ; which became, though for dif- 
ferent reasons, the classic ground of the pagan 
and Christian worlds. 

Egypt is, in point of physical features, the 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 



strangest country upon earth. It consists simply 
of a long narrow valley, with the Delta formed by 
the deposits of its river where it issues into the 
sea, of the length of about five hundred miles, 
and an average breadth of not more than seven. 
The cultivable land, from Syene to the commence- 
ment of the Delta, is simply a narrow slip of fer- 
tile soil, hemmed in by a belt of stony or sandy 
plain, reaching to the foot of the mountain chains 
which enclose it, and sometimes press closely on 
the river on either hand. The productive area, 
from Syene to the sea, may be estimated liberally 
at seven thousand square miles. In the time of 
the Pharaohs, it is said to have contained 
7,000,000 of inhabitants ; but the statement is 
a vague one, and, there is reason to think, some- 
what exaggerated. Sir Gardner Wilkinson esti- 
mates the present population at 1,500,000. It 
is a country in which rain seldom falls, but the= 
dews are copious. The land, as every child 
knows, is irrigated by the periodical overflowing 
of the river; which begins to rise at the time of 
the summer solstice, overflows the belt of cul- 
tivable land on its borders, and during its hun- 
dred days' dominion amply enriches the soil. 
The height of a fair average inundation is about 
forty feet at the Cataracts, thirty-six feet at 
Thebes, twenty-five feet at Cairo, and four feet 



6 THE LAND OF EGYPT : 

at the mouth of the river. A height of only 
twenty-three feet or twenty-four feet at Cairo, 
near which the Nilometer is situated, is followed 
by famine ; a height of twenty- seven feet lays 
the whole country waste. The rains in April and 
May in the highlands of Central Africa are sup- 
posed to be the cause of this marvellous pheno- 
menon, on which depends, and has depended for 
ages, the very existence of millions of the human 
family, and, in ancient times, the fate of the 
world's most splendid empire ; and yet, though 
lawless storms are the feeders of this river of 
Egypt, so strong and sure is the hand of the 
Creator, so delicate the balances in which He 
holds the adjustments of nature, that the Nile 
has continued to rise and fall within the pre- 
scribed limits, with rare exceptions, for, at any 
rate, four thousand years. The cultivation of 
the soil is most easy. The plough is hardly 
required ; it serves chiefly as a harrow. In the 
sculptures, the sower precedes the ploughshare, 
which is a slight instrument, and managed by a 
single hand. At the same time, the rise of the 
river was watched with intense anxiety, and the 
cultivation of the country was matter of extreme 
difficulty, in the years when the required height 
was not attained. With what joy does Moses 
contemplate the physical features of the Promised 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 



Land : — " For the land, whither thou goest in to 
possess it, is not as the land of Egypt from 
whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy 
seed, and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden 
of herbs : but the land, whither ye go to possess 
it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh 
water of the rain of heaven : a land which the 
Lord thy God careth for : the eyes of the Lord 
thy God are always upon it, from the beginning 
of the year even unto the end of the year." — 
Deut. ad., 10—12. 

Eyes wearied with the monotony of Egyptian 
scenery, hearts sick of the monotony of Egyptian 
life, revelled in the prospect of a land of rich 
natural beauty — of brooks, purling through green 
meadows nestled in the bosom of the hills, of 
mountains, springs, and foamy torrents, and all 
the brilliant variety of a highland country. Egypt 
is a monotone. Her part has been a monotone 
in the great choral hymn of the progress of the 
ages. Her unfathomable sphynx expresses, as 
perfectly as human art can express it, the mystery 
of the life of man. And Egypt is as far from the 
solution of it now, as when Moses led forth his 
shepherd tribes to seek, amid the awful desola- 
tions of Sinai, the solution from the lips of God. 
I do not know whether it has ever struck you, as 
you look into the faces of the Egyptian images at 



8 THE LAND OF EGYPT : 

the Museum or the Crystal Palace, that they are 
full of wonder and awe — as children amazed at a 
mystery which holds them in its spells, rather 
than as men of intellect and resolution, who see 
the mystery, but are minded to explore it or die. 
The Apollo looks out with open face into the uni- 
verse. Beauty in the Venus of Milo reigns. The 
masterpieces of Greek art hold up their heads 
with defiant or conquering strength and courage : 
you see that the men who carved those images 
are men who will invent, discover, and explore 
all domains where man's foot may tread ; they 
have in them the principle of progress — they 
will grow, create, and leave a glorious legacy to 
the Future. The Egyptian figures, on the other 
hand, are full of intellect; but it is beaten, 
baffled, oppressed by the mystery which oppresses 
the world. The men who wrought those images 
will not strive to wring out the secret from nature. 
Nature will master them ; they will bow down, 
and worship abjectly what they cannot explore. 
Every beast and reptile, every blade of grass, will 
re -present the mystery, and seem to them full of 
God. And such was actually their history. Their 
sphynx looked out with calm, unintelligent, un- 
aspiring wonder over the prolific land on whose 
borders it stood sentinel — beautiful in the serenity 
of its despair : and thus the people looked with 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 



idolatrous awe and reverence at the teeming 
fertility of the soil and of every living thing in 
Egypt; and they bowed down their^ souls, and 
worshipped every form of animal existence ; birds, 
beasts, reptiles, and every thing, however obscene 
and loathsome, which moveth upon the face of 
the earth. Take the testimony of Herodotus : — 

" Egypt, though bordering on Libya, does not abound in 
wild beasts ; but all that they have are accounted sacred, as 
well those that are domesticated as those that are not. But 
if I should give the reasons why they are consecrated, I must 
descend in my history to religious matters, which I avoid 
relating as much as I can ; and such as I have touched upon 
in the course of my narrative, I have mentioned from necessity. 
They have a custom relating to animals of the following kind : 
Superintendents, consisting both of men and women, are 
appointed to feed every kind separately ; and the son suc- 
ceeds the father in this office. All the inhabitants of the 
cities perform their vows to the superintendents in the follow- 
ing manner : Having made a vow to the god to whom the 
animal belongs, they shave either the whole heads of their 
children, or a half or a third part of the head, and then weigh 
the hair in a scale against silver, and whatever the weight 
may be, they give to the superintendent of the animals ; and 
she in return cuts up some fish, and gives it as food to the 
animals ; such is the usual mode of feeding them. Should 
any one kill one of these beasts, if wilfully, death is the 
punishment ; if by accident, he pays such fine as the priests 
choose to impose. But whoever kills an ibis or a hawk, 
whether wilfully or by accident, must necessarily be put to 
death 

' ' In whatever house a cat dies of a natural death, all the 



10 THE LAND OF EGYPT: 

family shave their eyebrows only ; but if a dog die, they shave 
the whole body and the head. All cats that die are carried to 
certain sacred houses, where, being first embalmed, they are 
buried in the city of Bubastis. All persons bury their dead 
clogs in sacred vaults within their own city ; and ichneumons 
are buried in the same manner as the dogs : but field-mice and 
hawks they carry to the city of Buto, the ibis to Hermopolis ; 
the bears, which are few in number, and the wolves, which 
are not much larger than foxes, they bury wherever they are 
found lying." — Herodotus, ii. 65 — 67. 

I think, if you look at them, the statues of the 
two peoples will expound their character, and 
explain their history. There are few English- 
men who have not seen the rich remains of 
Egyptian art and life which are contained in 
the Museum of our country, and who have not 
staid to gaze curiously on thoses trange symbols 
carved in stone by the Egyptian priests, which as 
yet half hide and half reveal the secrets of the 
primaeval ages of history. Into the vexed ques- 
tion as to the duration of man's existence upon 
this earth, which, not from this ground alone, is 
being urged upon our attention, I have happily 
here no call to enter. Science treads boldly, not 
to say defiantly, on ground which is claimed in the 
sacred name of revelation ; and has, not seldom, 
been compelled to recall her dicta and retrace her 
steps. Perhaps the reason of this defiant atti- 
tude is partly the jealousy with which narrow 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 11 

theologians have watched her explorations. A 
happier age is dawning; and whatever may he 
the final judgments of science on matters which 
fall fairly within her domain, theologians are 
thankful now to believe that it can hut end in 
the establishment of a higher harmony between 
man's knowledge and the essential truth of the 
Word of G-od. One thing, at any rate, has been 
made clear by the study of Egyptian monuments, 
that the writer of the Pentateuch must have 
known Egyptian life thoroughly, and must have 
had a native right to discourse of Egyptian things. 
And the world is full of buried witnesses to the 
truth of God. Every stone of the Desert, could it 
speak, would testify that Israel passed that way. 

The early history of Egypt is still buried in 
confusion, through which an orderly track is being 
slowly opened by the efforts of the ablest scholars 
of our time. From the time of Pharaoh Necho 
and his grandson Apries, or Pharaoh Hophra, who 
succeeded B.C. 595, who cross the track of the 
Scripture narrative, the course of Egyptian his- 
tory is clear. In the reign of Hophra, Greeks 
first appear upon the scene, and the history of 
Egypt becomes inwoven with the general history 
of the civilized world. In 523 B.C. the native 
dynasties were overthrown by Cambyses the Per- 
sian, and the Pharaohs disappear from history. 



12 THE LAND OF EGYPT : 

There can be no doubt that the Egyptian 
idolatry, being of a peculiarly degrading cha- 
racter, had plunged the people into the very 
depths of anarchy and moral pollution, when the 
Persian fire-flood swept the whole system away. 
So swept the fire -flood of Jewish conquest through 
Canaan, when the land was " weary of its inhabi- 
tants," and purged them out. Some baptisms 
must be of fire. About 400 B.C. the Persians 
relaxed their grasp, being fully occupied with 
Greek affairs ; and a native monarch, Amyrtaeus 
the Saite, occupied the throne after a long life of 
struggle against the Persian rule. He reigned 
from 414 B.C. for six years in tolerable prosperity, 
and was magnificently interred in a green breccia 
sarcophagus which you may see now in the British 
Museum. In the year 350 B.C. the Persians re- 
conquered' the country ; but at the disruption of 
the empire of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy 
Lagus, his ablest general, possessed himself of 
the sceptre, and under his successors Alexandria 
became the most wealthy and splendid city of the 
East. Under Augustus Csesar it became a Boman 
province, Alexandria being still one of the most 
important cities of the empire, and for three cen- 
turies, at any rate, the most learned school of 
the Christian Church. In the 5th century, Alex- 
andrian philosophy, Christianity, and society seem 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 13 

to have fallen again into that state of utter de- 
moralization, of hideous vice, which marked the 
close of the dynasty of the Pharaohs ; and in 
640 A.D. God again swept it by a fire-flood, and 
the fierce Mahometan conquerors trampled its 
pride and splendour in the dust. With them it 
remains to this day. But the cycle of time brings 
strange compensations, and Alexandria, as the 
key of the route to India, may again become one 
of the most important cities of the world. 

I proposed to myself two objects in this present 
discourse. In the first place, to give you a little 
condensed information about the country and 
people, of which some of you might be glad ; 
and, in the second place, and as the main sub- 
ject, to inquire what it is in Egypt which makes 
it the symbol of that world, that state of nature, 
that " house of bondage," out of which in all 
ages God calls His sons. 

That it is so employed in the Scripture, needs 
no proof. Why it is so used, it is worth while to 
consider. Babylon is not more identified in Scrip- 
ture with malignant Antichrist, than is Egypt 
with the ensnaring world. Why Babylon repre- 
sents to us Antichrist, while Egypt represents the 
world, it is not difficult to show. And here let 
me say, that, by the word " world" I am not 
seeking to indicate any places, occupations, or 



14 THE LA3s T D OF EGYPT : 

portions of the great human family. I find too 
much of the " world " in what passes for the 
Church, to dare to draw a visible line of demarca- 
tion. By the world here and throughout, I mean 
that without us — each one of us — which corre- 
sponds with the flesh within us ; that which 
tempts the too willingly tempted soul. 

The character of the Babylonish despotism, the 
ceaseless attempts of the Assyrian monarchs on 
the liberty of the Jewish Church, the injuries they 
inflicted on Palestine, and the ruin they brought 
on Jerusalem, fully explain the one symbol. 
Egypt, on the other hand, always assumed a more 
passive attitude, or at any rate was the seductress, 
rarely the assailant and tyrant, of G-od's people. 
It was expressly as a safeguard against seduction 
that the people were warned against going down 
into Egypt for war-horses, Deut. xvii. 16. Egypt 
was not malignant, but rather corrupt and effemi- 
nate. In a word, the quintessence of the world. 
How it was so, and what the symbol has to teach 
us who are called as sons out of Egypt, I proceed 
to show. 

God could have sent the patriarchs down into 
Assyria as easily as into Egypt. There must 
have been that in the temper and character of tte 
Egyptian people and land, which made it specially 
capable of showing the world its "form and 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 15 

pressure," and of furnishing in its relation with 
God's people a type, clear and impressive for 
all ages, of the method of God's deliverance of a 
soul. 

I shall consider two points. The character of 
Egypt, her life, and her influence on her children ; 
and the experience of the sons of God in relation 
thereto. 

I. The character of Egypt and her influence on 
her children. 

I observe — 

1. That Egypt was distinguished as the abode 
of a peculiarly easy and luxurious life. " Take 
thy fill, eat the fat, and drink the sweet," was 
her seductive song. The means of subsistence 
were inconceivably abundant. The very soil 
teemed with life. Trees and the nobler forms of 
animal life were rare, but the lower forms and 
the coarser — melons, cucumbers, garlic, dates, 
fish, fowl, and the like abounded. How coarse 
and foul are even the great beasts of Egypt, the 
crocodile and hippopotamus, compared with the 
splendid beasts of prey which are the terror of 
other and more highly organized lands ! Every- 
thing in Egypt has the mark of grossness on it. 
The higher faculties of man had little stimulus, 
the lower being surfeited with food. The luxury 



16 THE LAND OF EGYPT : 

of the Ptolemaic court was excessive.* In Egypt, 
as in the world, there was all that could lay the 
soul to sleep under its vine and fig-tree, and 
reduce it to the level of the brutes which the 
Egyptian worshipped as more wise and wonderful 
than man. 

This easiness of the terms of life is fatal to the 
noblest elements in man. Look at Naples. No 
heroism can be extracted from the Lazzaroni. Give 
the fellow a bit of bread, a slice of melon, and a 
drink of sour wine, and he will lie all day long on the 
quays, basking in the sun and the glorious air ; 
and 'what cares he if empires rise or totter to their 
fall? Egypt was the Naples of the old worlds- 
wealth, luxury, elaborate refinement, of a kind not 
inconsistent with grossness ; but no moral earnest- 
ness, no manhood, no life. Nature wooed man 
to her lap in Egypt and won him, bathing him in 
luxurious pleasures — Egypt was the world. 

Moreover, Egypt was cut off very much from 
all the political and intellectual activity in which 
Babylon was compelled to share. There was the 
stir and progress of life at Babylon. It was in 
the current, it must move on or sink. The high- 
way of human progress passed through Babylon. 
Its situation related it inevitably to the leading 

* See the elaborate description in the fifth book of the 
Ueipnosophists of Athenaeus. 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 17 

peoples of the world. It would probably be just 
to date the commencement of the higher civiliza- 
tion of man from the fall of Nineveh, and the rise 
of Babylon to be the leading city of the East. 
Babylon lay in the track of commerce, in the path 
of progress ; was brought into fruitful relations 
with neighbouring and even distant peoples, and 
was compelled to play a conspicuous part in the 
drama of the world's history. But Egypt, in her 
quiet nook, a cleft in the desert, enfolded by 
jealous wastes on every hand, was out of the line 
of march. She could " live to herself and die to 
herself," as was not possible for Babylon. She 
could play away her strength and her life in 
wanton pleasures at her will. Sense, the plea- 
sures of the world, pamper the self in man till it. 
kills and buries in its slime all the noble, unselfish, 
and distinctively manly powers; and thus Egypt 
nourished her children to wantonness, sloth, and 
emasculate manhood : feeding them, lulling them*, 
caressing them, as the world, it may be, is caress- 
ing you ; but robbing them, as the world is robbing 
you, of heaven and of God. 

2. Egypt is the image of the wanton world 
herein. It was full of the wisdom of this world, 
the wisdom of the understanding, which prosti- 
tutes itself easily to the uses of a sensual and 
earthly life. Man is not a beast, nor is earth a 

2 



18 THE LAND OF EGYPT: 

wild beasts' den. It is full of beautiful and glorious 
creations of human intellect and force ; but if the 
name of God is not on them they bear the badge 
of vile service, and lend themselves readily to 
unmanly use. When the sacred fire was cold in 
the temple of art in the sixteenth century, to 
what uses did men like Komano lend most wil- 
lingly their consummate powers ? What fruit did 
the complete intellectual culture of the eighteenth 
century bear to the world ? Egypt was in a sense 
the wisest of ancient nations, and yet her wisdom 
was worth least to mankind. She covered the 
land with cities and temples, invented arts, dis- 
covered powers, attained to a strength and stature 
whose grandeur has not yet been fully revealed. 
Yet where are the temples of Karnak, of Denderah ? 
What are they ? Jerusalem is still the magnet of 
all hearts, Eome the shrine of all priestly power. 
We still think, by the logic which Aristotle deve- 
loped ; and the constructive men of our time, the 
harmonists of long sundered spheres, in philo- 
sophy are Platonists to the heart's core. But 
Luxor, Memphis, Heliopolis — the floods have 
left them stranded, buried in the sands of time. 
The world looks at them with wonder, and 
steals their treasures to adorn her capitals; but 
the Obelisk of Luxor is not more alone and 
strange in the focus of modern civilization than 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 19 

is Egypt in modern history. She has given us 
no heroes. Mighty conquerors seem to have 
swept over vast regions, but none of them had 
genius to consolidate the empires which they 
won. Cyrus, Alexander, Csesar, tread still with 
imperial step in history. But Eamses, Sesostris, 
Amenophis, who knows more than their names ? 
Even such is the wisdom of this world, which 
cometh to nought. " Where is the wise, where is 
the scribe, where is the disputer of this world ?" 
Dead as the memory of Egyptian conquerors. 
That which lives must have some portion of 
diviner life and higher wisdom ; that which is of 
the earth earthy, as Egypt was, perishes as Egypt 
has perished, and its very ruin is choked by 
sand. 

The seeds of great things were in Egypt in 
rich abundance, but she could not nourish or 
force them to maturity. Even so, in the world's 
dust and slime the seeds of glorious things lie 
buried, waiting for the quickening breath of the 
Spirit of the Lord. The wisdom of Egypt was 
fruitless, wonderful as it was ; it availed only to 
make the priests luxurious tyrants, and the 
people miserable, soulless slaves. It simply esta- 
blished and maintained a system which studiously 
destroyed all elements of freedom and dignity in 
man ; and has left the world, as its one legacy, a race 

2—2 



20 THE LAND OF EGYPT : 

of the most abject slaves and drudges, the pity of 
travellers, the sport of domestic rulers, for two 
thousand years. There is something profoundly 
sad in the account of what their wisdom had 
brought them to, which is given to us by the 
Father of History, who saw it there four hundred 
and fifty years before Christ : — "At these con- 
vivial banquets, among the wealthy classes, when 
they have finished supper, a man carries round in 
a coffin the image of a dead body carved in wood, 
made as like as possible in colour and workman- 
ship, and in size generally about one or two 
cubits in length ; and showing this to each of the 
company he says, 'Look upon this, and then 
drink and enjoy yourself, for when dead you will 
be like this.' "—Herod, ii. 78. 

And is not this the world ? Is not the wisdom, 
which might have traced the path to heaven, busy 
clearing and paving the path to hell ; making life 
more cheap, death more trifling, man more beast- 
like every day ? Is not this the world's work in 
you ? Does it nourish and expand the real life 
of your being, cultivate your highest nature, and 
hold your lowest under firm control : or is it 
thickening daily the crust that is growing round 
your spirits, whereby celestial messengers more 
seldom reach them, and auroral radiance, gleam- 
ing through the heavenly spaces, is more rarely 



THE HOUSE OE BONDAGE. 21 

seen ? Does the world nourish the habit of 
self-communion, of heavenly contemplation, of 
prayer ? Egypt did not this for her children ; 
the world does it not for you — Egypt is the 
image of the world. Such was Egypt in herself 
and in her influence on her children. Now let us 
consider — 

II. The experience of God's children there — 
its influence on a people conscious that they had 
a soul to he saved. 

1. They went down to Egypt with the fairest 
prospects — certainty of sustenance, and promise 
of wealth, honour, and power. They were to 
settle in Goshen ; better, richer land than the 
bare hills which would be their only home in 
Canaan, whose rich valleys would be mainly 
occupied by the native inhabitants — land in every 
way suited to yield pasture to their flocks. I 
am not criticizing too keenly their motive in their 
descent to Egypt — but they went down to Egypt 
in more senses than one — as we all of us mostly 
go down to a great worldly success. And though 
it was brought about by most striking providential 
agencies, and was ruled by God for his own great 
ends, I am not sure that we are bound to believe 
that the motives were pure and unworldly which 
drew them thither. Jacob wanted the higher 



22 THE LAND OF EGYPT : 

courage of Abraham, wrio sent Lot down into the. 
rich valleys while he remained himself by the 
altar of his God. Some thought of the flesh-pots 
mingled with fraternal feeling; doubtless they 
went down to prosper, as men go down to win a 
fortune by their daily toils. And to how many of 
us is that fortune a Goshen ; and if we can get 
hold of any Joseph who can settle us there, God 
keep us from idolatry ! The memory of Hudson's 
statue is not yet cold. Still they found them- 
selves in Egypt in a very simple and natural way, 
and in a very comfortable and prosperous world. 

And why should we refuse the gifts of fortune ? 
Why should we not make the best of the good 
things that God puts within our reach ? Why 
should we not pass as many pleasant hours in 
this dull world as possible ? Is not 

"Dona praesentis cape lastus hone, ac 
Linque severa," 

the true philosophy of life ? So the world woos 
us. We are born in it, God placed us here, 
God gave us these keen senses, these imperious 
appetites, and the means of their fullest indul- 
gence ; and why should we tighten the rein ? 
See you no new reason why Egypt, when the 
patriarchs dwelt there, was a fit and full image 
of " the world?" 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 23 

2. They had not lived there long, before, rich 
and fruitful as was the land, they began to find 
their life a bondage. 

The cattle throve; they had fine possessions, 
and a monarch's favour. But they were men 
with living souls in them, as well as with cattle 
and stuff. They had heard the name of God; 
God knew tliem by name, and had inscribed them 
as heirs of a better country. They could not 
rest. Egypt was strange to them. They could 
not amalgamate with the inhabitants. The 
Egyptians came to feel it ; alienation sprang up 
and bitterness. Egypt laid chains on them to 
keep them in her service, while they groaned and 
writhed, and sighed to be gone — to be free. And 
rich as the world's pastures may be, propitious 
as may be its kings, the soul of man grows uneasy 
in its abodes. There are moments of utter heart- 
sickness amidst plenty and luxury, such as a sick 
child of the mountains knows, tossing on a purple 
bed of state : " Oh, for one breath of the sunny 
breezes, one glance at the shadows sweeping over 
the brown moorlands ; one breath, one vision, 
would give me new life." The very prosperity 
makes the soul conscious of its fetters. The man 
gets hide-bound with formalities, swathed in 
respectabilities, meshed in proprieties ; he lives 
in a round of weary, frivolous, heartless occupa- 



24 THE LAND OF EGYPT I 

tion, which kills the very soul of pleasure, and 
makes life, whose every sensation was once so 
joyous, a clog and a pain. 

3. The moment comes, in every experience, 
when the bondage becomes too grievous to be 
borne ; when the spirit cries out and wrestles for 
deliverance, and the iron, blood-rusted, enters 
the very heart. 

"And the Egyptians made the children of 
Israel to serve with rigour : and they made their 
lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in 
brick, and in all manner of service in the field ; 
all their service, wherein they made them serve, 
was with rigour." — Exodus, i. 13, 14. 

"And Pharaoh said, Behold, the people of the 
land now are many, and ye make them rest from 
their burdens. And Pharaoh commanded, the 
same day, the taskmasters of the people and their 
officers, saying, Ye shall no more give the people 
straw to make brick, as heretofore : let them go 
and gather straw for themselves. And the tale 
of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye 
shall lay upon them ; ye shall not diminish aught 
thereof: for they be idle; therefore they cry, 
saying, Let us go and sacrifice to our God. Let 
there more work be laid upon the men, that they 
may labour therein ; and let them not regard vain 
words. And the taskmasters of the people went 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 25 

out, and their officers, and they spake to the 
people, saying, thus saith Pharaoh, I will not 
give you straw. Go ye, get you straw where ye 
can find it : yet not aught of your work shall be 
diminished. So the people were scattered abroad 
throughout all the land of Egypt, to gather stubble 
instead of straw. And the taskmasters hasted 
them, saying, Fulfil your works, your daily tasks, 
as when there was straw. And the officers of the 
children of Israel, which Pharaoh's taskmasters 
had set over them, were beaten, and demanded, 
Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your task in 
making brick both yesterday and to-day, as here- 
tofore? Then the officers of the children of 
Israel came and cried unto Pharaoh, saying, 
Wherefore dealest thou thus with thy servants ? 
There is no straw given unto thy servants, and 
they say to us, Make brick : and, behold, thy 
servants are beaten ; but the fault is in thine 
own people. But he said, Ye are idle, ye are 
idle : therefore ye say, Let us go and do sacrifice 
to the Lord. Go therefore now and work ; for 
there shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye 
deliver the tale of bricks." — Exodus, v. 5 — 18. 

It is a chapter out of our own history. The 
men became conscious of their higher vocation, 
and wept and pleaded more earnestly; and their 
tyrants yoked them more tightly, and loaded them 



26 THE LAND OF EGYPT : 

more heavily ; till, like Job, they cursed God's 
light and hated life, in bitterness of soul. And 
the soul in its Egypt, the world, drinks deep of 
this experience. The moment comes when it 
wakes up and says, " I am a slave;" "I am a 
beast ; " " I will shake off this yoke; " " I will be 
free." Then begins a battle-agony ; a strife for 
life and immortality — the end either a final, 
eternal relapse into captivity, or an exodus into 
the wilderness and to heaven. 

Let the soul fight its own battles, and the most 
heroic struggles shall not save it. Let it follow 
the Captain of Salvation, and gird on the armour 
of God, and death and hell shall not spoil it. It 
shall sweep as " on eagles' wings" through the 
toils and perils of the desert, and rest at last in 
the "rest that remaineth for the people of God." I 
believe that once, at any rate, God leads every man 
to the edge of this desert: "There, where the 
flame column lights the path through the darkness 
is the way of a free man to liberty and heaven. 
Behind you are the flesh-pots, the melons, the 
fish, and the garlic, enough of them to surfeit 
you. Nov/ choose, and for ever." 

Choose now, and choose for ever. You cannot 
make the tale of bricks which the devil demands 
from you. When have you had a moment's rest 
in his service, a moment's hope? How often 



THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 27 

have you cursed the bondage, and writhed under 
the yoke ! How often have you hurled fierce 
anathemas at the lusts which enslave you, as you 
felt, with a darkness of heart to which the gather- 
ing gloom of death were as morning twilight, that 
the world was conquering, that your resistance 
was weaker daily, that the battle would soon be 
over, and your soul in the outer darkness for 
ever ! Or perhaps you are satisfied with Egypt, 
its flesh-pots and flavours; you do your daily 
service like a task, wearily, if you may but play 
or wanton when it is done. You spur the jaded 
senses with fierce excitement : the casino, the 
gambling-house, the masquerade, if the burning 
brands do not drop too thickly, are the only 
pleasures that have the taste of pleasure to your 
surfeited heart. I know not what to say, or how to 
deal with you. Will you lie there and rot among 
your pleasures, as Egypt lay and rotted; and then 
be swept out into the outer darkness, where " the 
worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched for 
ever." 

But if there be one pang of pain, one cry of 
weariness, one aspiration for liberty and life, I 
preach to you an exodus. Choose, choose now, 
choose for ever — the flesh-pots of Egypt, the eter- 
nal darkness, or — Exodus into the wildekness 
with God ! 



28 OUT OF EGYPT 



■qmon xi 

Out of Egypt have I called My Son. 

Compare Exod. xii. 30-41, with Matt. ii. 15. 

Egypt is the " house of bondage," where God's 
children are enslaved — the land of easy subsist- 
ence, of worldly wisdom, of carnal completeness : 
yet of bondage to the spirit which has caught the 
tones of a divine vocation, has heard a promise, 
has executed a covenant with God. The bondage 
becomes more bitter as the soul becomes more 
conscious of aspiration and duty, — as it strives 
for liberty and pants for life. The world exacts 
its tasks, the devil demands his tale, with more 
cruel despotism, as the voice of the Lord is heard 
cleaving the darkness, and calling forth His sons. 
At length the case becomes quite desperate. The 
question is of life or death. * ' I can no longer gasp 
in this dense atmosphere, steaming with the 
smoke of the flesh-pots, and stinking with the 
fetor of corruption, — I must go forth. In the 
desert there is air, light, and freedom, and be- 
yond there are worlds which are the spirit's 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 29 

home." Then begin throes and struggles which 
rend the very substance of the being, and tear 
the fabric, of our world. The world and hell 
muster all their power to crush us ; heaven's 
bright hosts throng thither to aid. Nature seems 
to groan and shroud herself in gloom during that 
mighty travail ; all heaven, all hell, battling for 
the possession of a soul. Then amidst porten- 
tous gloom, shivering with terror and shrinking 
with weakness, the soul passes out of its bondage, 
through mountain gorges and walls of water, 
pressed by foes and led by God, till it stands at 
length a free soul under the lustrous canopy of 
the desert heaven ; and sees, with an awful joy, 
breaking forth into triumphal hymns, a broad sea 
flowing between it and the land of its bondage, 
and its tyrants dead upon the shore. Such is the 
picture of a soul's deliverance, which the scripture 
history presents to us. I shall in this discourse 
endeavour to present to you, as vividly as I can, 
the leading features of this exodus of Israel, and 
thence illustrate the exodus of the soul. 

During the period of their abode in Egypt, the 
seventy souls which went down with Jacob had 
multiplied and become a nation — " six hundred 
thousand that were men, besides children," as- 
sembled in Succoth on the eve of the exodus. 
The increase appears to be enormous. But, in 



30 OUT OF EGYPT 



truth, it is but a fair allowance, considering all 
that was in their favour, the immense fertility of 
Egypt, the abundant nourishment, and the extent 
to which polygamy still prevailed. It is to be 
considered, too (as Mr. Drew has pointed out in 
his able and scholarly book on Scripture Lands, 
note, p. 30,*) that the total number of Hebrew 
immigrants must have been considerable, far ex- 
ceeding the seventy of the house of Jacob " which 
came out of his loins." — Gren. xlvi. 26, 27. A 
family had come down into Egypt, a nation was 
ready to depart. The Israelites did not belong- 
to Egypt, they never had a home there. There 
was something infused into their composure which 
made them of finer quality than the slaves of 
Egyptian plenty; they were a race of higher 
strain, and in bondage they could not rest. True, 
it had weakened them, demoralized them ; much 
of their freedom was crippled, and their fineness 
marred. But no more could the Prodigal herd 
with the citizens of the swinish country, than 
could Israel, all bedimmed and degraded, herd 
with Pharaoh's slaves. 

The character and conscious destiny of the 
race, buried from common eyes in the sensual 
life of the multitude, stood out, in one man's form 

* Scripture Lands, "by the Bev. G. S. Drew, M.A. Smith, 
Elder and Co. ... 



II AYE I CALLED MY SOjS t . 31 

and history, with preternatural clearness. There 
are these "prerogative" men in all ages, in whom 
the capabilities and tendencies of a race or com- 
munity come out and express themselves. Men 
who, by a life of toil and sacrifice, bring out the 
latent possibilities of their brethren, and make 
the people, after long discipline, what they are 
themselves by the vocation of God. Moses, 
nursed in the very lap, fed from the very bosom, 
of Egypt, felt that the blood of his race had 
some diviner tincture than that of the smooth, 
soft, wanton, wondering Egyptians, among whom 
he abode. He loved the desert more than the 
city ; the free range of open pastures better than 
the fanes of temples, or the palaces of kings. 
By a strange chain of circumstances God led him 
forth into the desert, and trained him there, in 
freedom and solitude, for the grandest work ever 
committed to the hand of man. Moses is the 
man of Israel. You must see Israel in his mirror, 
if you would understand, as God understood, 
what varied powers the people had in them. And 
thus, if you would understand man, you must 
"see Jesus," in whom what man shall be appears, 
Moses, according to God's universal plan, was 
thus disciplined ; hardened and sharpened to be 
God's instrument of deliverance. He came back 
with a calm but unconquerable resolution to 



OUT OF EGYPT 



redeem his race. Meantime, while God was 
educating the leader, the world was preparing the 
masses for deliverance ; was pressing them so 
hardly, smiting them so sharply, that in very 
desperation at last they were ready to achieve 
liberty or die. Then follows a series of most 
tremendous portents, by which the people were 
uprooted from Egypt, their very lusts and 
passions tamed and quelled ; while Egypt was 
set before them, not as a tyrant, who, if he 
smote and burdened them, at any rate fed and 
housed them, but as an embittered enemy, 
between whom and themselves there must hence- 
forth be battle of life or death. After these dread 
miracles Egypt was to them no longer a house 
of bondage, but as a valley of death, as a gate 
of hell. The last judgment, the most awful, 
made eternal schism between them and Egypt. 
Egypt herself cast them forth in terror, and 
besought them to depart out of her coasts. — 
Exodus, xii. 29-33. 

From out the shadow of that death-haunted 
night, themselves pallid with dread, they passed 
forth. The powers of the world to come were 
acting visibly on that theatre — the secret of the 
Lord was laid bare. They went forth, not naked 
and crouching, as captives, glad of life on the 
meanest conditions, but as men girt for their life- 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 33 

work; "harnessed," they faced their future. 
They reclaimed, at the world's hand, all the 
treasures of which ages of bondage had robbed 
them; they "asked," not "borrowed," but 
asked with open face of the Egyptians jewels 
of silver and jewels of gold and raiment, and 
they bore them forth as men that had a right to 
them, and would use them in the service of the 
living God. The Egyptians gave their treasures 
as to men favoured of heaven ; and one day all 
the world's wealth and splendour, now lavished 
on its idolatries, shall pass into the hands of Christ, 
and bear the inscription, " Holiness unto the 
Lord." 

Thus harnessed, with their wives and little 
ones, with every fleece and every hoof, with 
jewels of silver and jewels of gold — not at all 
as men stealing away from their acknowledged 
master, but as subjects seeking the service of 
their rightful king — the children of Israel went up 
with all their armies out of " the land of Egypt, 
the house of bondage." 

It is a matter of extreme difficulty to trace 
their path. That they crossed the Bed Sea into 
the wilderness of Sinai is clear ; but where they 
crossed and by what route they reached it, is 
fiercely debated among the best scholars, even 
at the present day. The stations are Ramses, 

h- 3 



34 OUT OF EGYPT 



Succoth, Etham, and Pihahiroth, the passage of 
the Eed Sea, and the encampment in the wilder- 
ness. But none of these stations can be fixed 
with certainty, and no theory can be constructed 
which is entirely free from difficulty. Moses, it 
must be remembered, was familiar with the whole 
region ; a man, moreover, of large forethought 
and resource, prepared for this great movement, 
and therefore, we must suppose, prepared with 
some general plan of their course. The difficulty 
is how to bring the children of Israel into such a 
station as that of Pihahiroth, without attributing 
to Moses an utter want of skill and foresight as a 
leader ; or without, on the other hand, according 
to the apprehension of some, even orthodox, 
critics, drawing too largely on the supernatural, 
which mostly appears to sustain and strengthen 
the practical wisdom of the man who had been so 
richly endowed for his work. 

We shall not, probably, be wrong in placing 
Kamses in the neighbourhood of modern Cairo* 
— at any rate in that district of Egypt. From 
that point a tolerably direct eastern course would 
bring them to the head of the gulf which forms 
the western arm of the Eed Sea. Succoth was 

* This, however, is by no means certain. Very able 
scholars, following the LXX., identify Kamses with Heroopolis 
— considerably to the north-west of the head of the gulf. 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 35 

their first station. It could not have been far 
from Ramses. It means " tents," and was pro- 
bably a mustering-place for those who were 
journeying eastward through the desert for the 
purposes of traffic or war. Their next station 
was Etham, "on the edge of the wilderness;'''" 
and here the difficulty begins. The Gulf of Suez 
manifestly stretched, in ancient times, far to the 
north-west of its present head. It is quite possi- 
ble that the passage took place on some point 
which is now part of the isthmus, whose features 
are now all but obliterated by sand. Etham 
would seem, from the narrative, to be some place 
whence the desert might be reached by an easy 
route ; whence, indeed, it was possible to pass up 
northwards, and follow the track, " by the way 
of the sea," to Palestine ; or, bending to the 
south-east, seek the real desert by the wilder- 
ness of the Red Sea. There, at Etham, on the 
edge of the desert, a strange, and, humanly 
speaking, inexplicable message reached them. 
"And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak 
unto the children of Israel that they turn and 
encamp before Pihahiroth ; between Migdol and 
the sea, over against Baalzephon, before it shall 
ye encamp by the sea." — Exodus, xiv. 1, 2. 

This direction turned them back from their 
route round the head of the gulf, and brought 



36 OUT OF EGYPT 



them down its western side, at some distance from 
the sea. They are expressly told to turn. There 
are two possible explanations. Either Moses led 
them too far southwards, and was in danger of 
finding himself on the coast of the gulf, at a 
point where there was no prospect of crossing, 
and was then told to turn northwards, that he 
might double its head, when he found himself cut 
off by the Egyptian forces, and was compelled to 
encamp in the gorge on the border of the sea ; 
or, he was fairly en route for the desert, by a track 
which he knew well, when he was deliberately 
told to turn southwards, into a difficult and moun- 
tainous country, where he might find himself 
cooped up in a wild ravine, with the Egyptian 
host behind him, the deep sea in front of him, 
and the cliffs on either hand so precipitous and 
close up to the edge of the gulf, that there was no 
way of escape for him northward along the shore.* 
I believe the latter to be the true explana- 
tion, and that this apparent entanglement was 
so ordered by God. Their strange course, in 
turning southwards from Etham to the moun- 
tainous country on the Egyptian coast of the Eed 
Sea, filled the scouts who were observing their 
march with wonder. They no doubt bore the 

* See an interesting and able report on this subject, by 
Captain Moresby, in Aiton's Lands of the Messiah, 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 37 

tidings to Pharaoh, " they are entangled in the 
land, the wilderness hath shut them in." These 
tidings evidently directed and quickened his pur- 
suit. It would seern that they reached a gorge 
in the mountains of which the exit was securely 
barred by the sea. God's direction was explicit. 
No human arm, no human wisdom was to work 
their deliverance. What follows, in the fourteenth 
of Exodus, completes the wonderful story. " Fear 
ye not, stand still and see the salvation of God ; the 
Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your 
peace," was the inspiring word of Moses. And 
this is the key of the whole narrative. That they 
might stand still and see God's salvation, they 
had been led into such straits. And thus, from 
a narrow cleft of the mountain, barred behind by 
all the forces of Egypt, and in front by an arm of 
the sea, they were brought forth with an high 
hand and a stretched-out arm, out of the land 
of bondage. The broad free expanse of the wilder- 
ness at last spread round them, its brilliant sky 
and burning stars above them ; and a broad sea, 
deep and still as the waters of Lethe, swept 
between them and the scenes of their slavish 
tasks, their swinish pleasures, their careless serf- 
dom, to flow on for ever. " As for the Egyptians 
whom ye have seen to-day, ye shall see them again no 
more for ever." Then while the solemn desert air 



OUT OF EGYPT 



was hushed about them, and the morning sun- 
light bathed the scene of their triumphal exodus, 
and poured a flood of golden splendour around 
the camp of God's redeemed, rang forth the notes 
of the most magnificent jubilant hymn that human 
lips have ever uttered or heaven has ever heard : 
" And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, 
took a timbrel in her hand ; and all the women 
went out after her with timbrels and dances. 
And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the 
Lord, fob He hath triumphed gloriously, the 

HORSE AND HIS RIDER HATH He THROWN INTO 
THE SEA." Ex. XV. 20, 21. 

Thus Israel completed the exodus. Thus God 
redeemed His sons. In the wilderness of Shur 
we leave them awhile, to consider what this won- 
derful exodus has to do with us — how Israel's 
history is the painted picture of our own. 

I. We cannot treat this as an isolated fact in 
history. As I have already shown, Egypt is the 
type of the cunning, careless, wanton world out 
of which in all ages God is calling His sons. 
And the exodus remained a living fact in history. 
The infant Jesus went down into Egypt, as the 
infant Israel went down, not to repeat the exodus, 
but to illume afresh its fading lines. The descent 
of Jesus into Egypt is just a divine index of the 
significance of this history to man in all his 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 39 

generations. His wilderness was Judea, his own 
Jerusalem ; like ours, the home of our nativity, 
the theatre of our life-work, our nearest, dearest, 
most beautiful and familiar things. I have likened 
Egypt to the house of bondage in which each 
one of us labours. I have now to show how out 
of Egypt God is calling His sons. " His sons! 
Yes," some of you will say, " let me but know 
that I am one of the elect race, the chosen gene- 
ration, the royal priesthood, and I come forth at 
once ! God forbid that I should waste here, 
among bricks and flesh-pots, the force which will 
put Canaan into my power ! But how am I to 
know ? The cases are not parallel. Suppose I 
leave my Egypt, and fall in the fruitless effort to 
force my way uncalled to the promised land ! 
Show me my vocation ; show me my name on 
the muster-roll of God's elect host, and I am 
ready at this moment to take up sword and shield 
and go. In the case of Israel every man knew 
himself called, every child of Abraham was in- 
cluded in the vocation ; to every child of Abraham 
those awful miracles sealed the promises of God." 
And they seal the same to you. 

I say at once, that the whole history of Israel 
would be quite dark to me if I could not look 
upon it as a picture of God's dealings, not with 
an elect circle of men, but with mankind. I read 



40 OUT OF EGYPT 



in the Gospel that " God loveth the world " — the 
world in its rebellion. I read that " Christ died 
for all men." That as the hour of His agony 
drew near, He took the whole world to His heart 
of love, " And I, if I he lifted up, ivill draw all 
men unto Me." I am told that the book is given 
to me to teach me this : that every line of it has 
a distinct relation to its great end — the proclama- 
tion of a Gospel to a whole human world. Its 
last cry of invitation is to " Whosoever is atliirst, 
whosoever will ; " and with this the revelation is 
sealed. I take up my Bible, and a casual glance 
shows me that three-fourths of its bulk is occu- 
pied with the history of this people. I am driven 
to the supposition that the history of this people 
is a microcosm, in which I can see the history of 
all peoples — that Israel is, in little, all the world. 
A closer inspection of the Word sustains the sup- 
position. There is absolutely no other key. 
Unless we take the kingdom of Heaven to mean 
the whole mass of those who have heard the 
proclamation of Christ's Kingship, and know 
themselves amenable to His laws, then the people 
of Israel is not, and cannot be made, typical of the 
kingdom of Heaven. Once lay it down as a prin- 
ciple that there are those in the world whom, by 
a distinct act of His Sovereignty, God calls out 
of the world, and leads forth to a pilgrimage 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 41 

which, despite many backslidings and short- 
comings, terminates inevitably in heaven, and 
you may shut up your bibles, you may shut up 
the book of experience, you may shut up the 
history of Israel specially — sovereignty is all that 
you have to do with ; search for evidence of that, 
it will save you all further trouble ; and if you 
find no evidence of that in yourself or in other 
men, at least you know your destiny, it will save 
you all further hope. 

If I were compelled to say to you, my commis- 
sion is to call certain of you, who have God's 
mark upon you, out of this congregation into the 
living fellowship of the Church ; some of you 
being Israelites though unconscious, some of you 
being of the world, Egyptians in blood, habit, 
character, and inevitable destiny ; the only point 
of uncertainty being as to who was of the one, 
and who was of the other side, — I declare to you 
solemnly, I would shut up this book, and shake off 
the dust of my feet as I leave this desk, as a testi- 
mony against the most solemn mockery which a 
man can enact before the face of God. That 
God has His own in all ages; that out of this 
company there are those who will join that sacred 
band, and some who will snuff the flesh-pots of 
Egypt, and laugh at liberty and divine joys, I 
cannot question ; alas, it is made daily too clear ! 



42 OUT OF EGYPT 



That none can join that holy company except by 
the Father's grace and attractive power, seems as 
solemnly plain. What can "effectual" mean 
except that which is penetrated with the strength 
of God ? But that God has already settled it — 
has put a mark on one and another, and decreed 
to this one an exodus, a desert pilgrimage, and a 
triumphant entrance into Canaan, whilst to the 
other the flesh-pots are left in indifference or 
scorn — is a conception of His relations and ways 
to man which does violence to the deepest con- 
victions of the human spirit, and the clearest 
statements, the most earnest and heart-searching 
appeals of the word of God. 

I believe solemnly that each one of you, to 
whom these words may come, is elect as Israel 
was that night ; that to each one of you the 
summons comes as distinctly, as peremptorily 
from God, "Arise ye, and depart, for this is not 
your rest." They were an elect race. Let us 
ask wherefore, and to what. 

Wherefore ? They were of the race of Abra- 
ham : that marked them ; that constituted their 
distinctity. And you are of the race of the 
second Adam, who " seeing that the children 
were partakers of flesh and blood, Himself also 
took part of the same." That is your distinctity. 
You are of the same race, the same flesh and 



HAVE I CALLED MY SOX. 43 

blood as Jesus ; and all who wear a human form 
and understand a human voice, God calls forth 
from Egypt : His voice is even now piercing, 
flashing like electric fire through the gross 
darkness which enwraps the land of bondage in 
which they torment and strain His sons, " Come 
forth to freedom, life, and heaven." If Israel 
was of the race of Abraham after the flesh, never 
forget — let it shame you in your abject serfdom, 
your swinish pleasures — you are after the flesh of 
the race of Christ. " Awake then, sleeper, and 
arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee 
life." 

And to what were they elect ? 

To what did God call them, deliver them, 
bring them out with a high hand and a stretched 
out arm? Was it to Canaan, to triumph, to 
glorious rest ? Yes, in His will He called them 
to all this, but failing their will, how many of 
them fell in the wilderness ! He states, in the 
most solemn terms, that it was His will to bring 
them into Canaan ; then, as their will went not 
with His will, He swears as solemnly, that they 
shall not enter into His rest. This opens up an 
awful abyss of speculation. Who hath resisted 
God's will ? What finite being can resist Him 
"who doeth according to His own will among 
the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants 



44 OUT OF EGYPT 



of earth ; none can stay His hand, or say unto 
Him, What doest thou ? " You will find a grand 
distinction, in scripture and in life, between what 
God wills and what God decrees : when He says 
a thing shall he, it must be. When He says He 
wills it, if it is within the region of the moral acti- 
vity of the creature, the will of the finite creature 
may counterwork the will of God. " He wills all 
men to he saved" There were those of whom the 
Saviour testified weeping, " But ye would not." 

One feels that in this region it is easy to 
darken counsel with words without knowledge ; 
there are deep mysteries on every hand. It 
is well if we can find some clue to guide us 
even a little way. I am far from imagining that 
I can dispose of the difficulty by a few weak 
words. Had Egypt no vocation as well as Israel ? 
It is a dark mystery. But we can see that, in 
order to understand even a portion of God's ways, 
we must recognize humanity at large and through 
the ages, as well as the individual man, as having 
distinct existence before God. It is only on the 
scale of the universal, that much of His method 
can be understood. But how much remains dark 
after all our efforts! " the depth of the riches 
both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! how 
unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways 
past finding out ! For who hath known the mind 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 45 

of the Lord ? or who hath been His counsellor ? 
Or who hath first given to Him, and it shall he 
recompensed to him again ? For of Him, and 
through Him, and to Him, are all things : to 
whom be glory for ever. Amen." Let us be 
deeply thankful that God has given us His great 
love to the world in Christ, as the clue to guide 
us through the maze of His counsels. We cannot 
err if, understanding all that love includes, we 
take it as our constant guide. One shudders, 
sometimes, at the flippant fluency with which 
some theologians, standing consciously on the 
safe side of the line of effectual calling, expound 
all that God is doing in judgment on the other. 
Some say they " glory in a God of judgment." 
I believe in the judgments of love, and hold the 
judgments of love to be the most awful which can 
be conceived; but I am thankful that I have 
learnt to glory, as I pray that you, my brother, 
may be able to glory, in a God who " is love." 

I find, then, the most perfect parallelism 
between your case and the case of Israel. You 
are called to an exodus. You are called to get up 
from your slavish lusts, your sensual pleasures, 
and go forth. He calls you all forth from Egypt 
as His sons — calls you forth to the desert, the 
fiery pillar, the manna, the spiritual rock ; and 
while you aim at Canaan, His will, His heart are 



46 OUT OF EGYPT 



on your side. Be loyal ; take His yoke upon you, 
and dare His service, and trie pursuers of Egypt 
shall not reach you, the rangers of the desert 
shall not spoil you, the usurpers of Canaan shall 
not stay you from the mastery of the Promised 
Land. 

I proceed, in the second place, to sketch, 

II. The moral features of the exodus. 

1. There was a life in Egypt which had become 
insupportable to a man. A beast might bear it, 
a slave with a slave's heart might bear it, but a 
man with a spark of a man's spirit within him 
would choose rather the alternative of death. I 
have already painted the picture. I have shown 
to you how the bondage became daily more 
galling and profitless, until the slaves cried out 
for death to set them free. It is the picture of 
the state of a soul around which the devil's toils 
are closing, which has given up the hope of living 
in freedom, and leaps to death for change, at any 
rate, if not oblivion. 

Think you not that, every night while you are 
calmly slumbering, there are poor devil-driven 
wretches prowling about our streets and bridges, 
looking down into the dark water rushing and 
glancing beneath them, and singing to them a 
song which the devil suggests will be a lullaby to 
anguish and remorse ? Think you that in our 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 47 

crowded streets, in broad daylight, you do not 
brush by many a faithful servant of Satan, who 
is agitating in his distracted heart the question, 
Can hell itself be more burning than these flames 
which consume me now ? Yea, amid all the hum 
of the world's thronged thoroughfares, the drowsy 
hymn of its sleek prosperities, there enters into 
the ear of the Lord God who made it all, a cease- 
less bitter cry against the strain of the world's 
bondage, over the sweat and blood of the soul 
wrung out and wasted in the dust. And there is 
not one of you that has not felt the iron searing, 
scorching into the very heart's core. There is 
not one of you that has not wearied, and sickened, 
and cried out, though vaguely and fitfully, for aid. 
And God is looking down upon it all. His patience 
touches its limits. Hear His word ; translate it 
into your modern speech ; it is His word to you 
this day: — " And the Lord said, I have surely 
seen the affliction of my people which are in 
Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of 
their taskmasters ; for I know their sorrows ; and 
I am come down to deliver them out of the hand 
of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of 
that land unto a good land and a large." — Exod. 
hi. 7, 8. 

2. They saw the stroke of heaven fall on all 
that adorns, enriches, and nourishes a worldly life. 



48 OUT OF EGYPT 



There was a pomp, a pride, a sensual glow in 
the life of teeming and magnificent Egypt, very 
ensnaring to man's wanton heart. The sweet water 
of the Nile — sweetest water in the world, sweeter 
than wine and honey to an Egyptian — the broad 
fields of corn, the teeming life everywhere, the 
beautiful cattle, the crowded population, the elastic 
air, the brilliant sun-light, the burning stars — 
these Egyptians worshipped it all. What is good, 
what is God, but these ? And the scathing curse 
of heaven fell upon it all. The Israelites saw the 
awful forms of the ministers of the Divine judg- 
ments moving amidst the pomp and splendour, 
and it withered, crackled, and became as fuel to 
the flame before their eyes. Never before or since 
has the world had such a lesson, on the meaning 
and worth of civilization without God. And when 
the sword of the destroyer swung through the 
heavy air, and smote every first-born in the land, 
they understood, in the very core of their trembling 
consciences, that the world's wealth and splendour 
without God may be Hell. And God hath revealed 
it unto you. You have had your idols; they have 
been ground to powder, and you have tasted their 
bitter dust. Nothing that a soul can be tempted 
to trust to in contempt of God has been spared. 
Your business has failed, your cattle have fallen, 
your children — a tender mercy it may be to them 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 49 

— lie in the graveyard, and in bitterness of soul 
you have been made to feel that the universe 
itself, and all it doth inherit, were an apple of 
Sodom, unless it came to you from the hand of 
the Lord, and were consecrated by His benediction 
to your use. It is the dread hour of a soul's 
vocation, when these plagues fall on its idols ; 
God is calling it out of Egypt. Egypt is full, not 
of flesh-pots, but of wailing and death. To stay is 
not only to grovel in bondage, it is to grope in 
outer darkness ; it is to mate with the devils in 
hell. For if God has shown to you the vanity of 
your idols, the loathsomeness of your lusts, and 
you still cling to them, it is the devil you worship, 
it is hell you cling to : the cloak, which we name 
" the world," is stripped from off them, and these 
are the realities behind. 

3. There is a Divine leader — a man commis- 
sioned and inspired by God. 

Of all classes, slaves are the most dependent on 
leaders; and, when led, most terrible to their 
tyrants. When the Koman slaves found leaders, 
they became the most formidable enemies of the 
State. But how shall these poor Israelites be 
free ? Unused to independent action, unskilled 
in arms, unbraced for war, who shall organize 
and head them ; who shall uplift their banner, 
strike the first stroke, and by his strength and 

4 



50 OUT OF EGYPT 



courage inspire them with the hope of victory '? 
In the very crisis of their history, when the inso- 
lence of their tyrants and the misery of their lot 
had culminated, a divine leader stood in the midst 
of them, and declared that the Lord God Almighty, 
the Master of the Egyptians, the Master of the 
universe, was on their side. 

There are times when man is specially conscious 
of his spiritual dependence, when his heart is 
open to Divine monitions, when from the depth 
of his spirit he prays, " Except thy presence go 
with me, carry me not up hence." Man can 
blink the aspect of the heavenly presences in his 
daily tasks and pleasures ; but when the deeper 
fountains are stirred, when the stagnant pool 
of his serfdom is swept by the storms of life, 
when his idols perish, his landmarks fail — how 
piteous, how abject often, his cry to the God 
whom he has forgotten or scorned, for aid ! Then 
how gentle, how generous, how loving, how hope- 
inspiring the response ! A man steps forth, clad 
in all the meekness and patience of sorrowful 
humanity, yet inspired with all the strength and 
wisdom of the eternal Word of God, and clasping 
us with the love of a brother, the strength of a 
captain, bears us forth into open battle with our 
foes. Moses stood forth, and all the heavenly 
hosts stood with him. The people, yearning to 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON". 51 

know if God was with them in their perilous en- 
terprise, heard his voice and dared the exodus. 
The force that upholds the heavens and crushes 
hell, expressed itself in that voice and gesture. 
He stood there — the divine man — pledge to them 
of an everlasting victory. 

" And now, seeing ye are compassed about 
with so great a cloud of witnesses, lay aside every 
weight and the sin which doth so easily beset 
you, and run with patience the race which is set 
before you, looking unto Jesus, the author and 
finisher of your faith; who, for the joy that was set 
before Him, endured the cross, despising the 
shame, and is set down at the right hand of the 
throne of God." " Consider the Apostle and High 
Priest of your profession, Christ Jesus," who in 
the house and the work in which Moses wrought 
as a servant, represents God as the Son. No 
mere man can take the headship of humanity. 
For us it has been assumed by "Emmanuel," 
" God with us." Hell is strong; but He who 
hath the keys of death and hell is stronger ; and 
He is with you, young pilgrim, and will bury the 
universe in ruins before one hair of your head 
shall, unpermitted, fall. Well may you cry, tor- 
mented by inward traitors and pressed by con- 
quering foes, " miserable man that I am, who 
shall deliver me from the body of this death ?" 

4—2 



52 OUT OF EGYPT 

Look up ! a glorious Captain of the Lord's host 
is here ; His title is, " Mighty to save." Those 
foes that press you, He has already grappled with 
and conquered; their blood empurples His tri- 
umphal raiment; He waves his consecrated 
banner — the Cross, by which He won the victory 
— and passes onward, onward, to complete the 
triumph and to gather the spoils of the war. Lift 
your hand and swear to follow Him ; grasp His 
banner and pass on, cross-bearing in His tracks, 
and you shall fight a good fight on the arena of 
life's battles; and, dying with a freeman's shout of 
triumph on your lips, pass up to share the glory 
of your Captain, and reign with Him on His 
recovered throne. 

4. We discern a condition of utter dependence 
on the strength and faithfulness of God. 

They were delivered by a Divine Work. Shut 
up there in Pihahiroth, arm of flesh could not 
help them ; the right hand of God was their only 
aid. "Fear ye not, stand still, and see the sal- 
vation of God," is the word which is passed 
through their host. If God comes forth, there 
will be triumphant deliverance ; if God fail, there 
will be slavery and death. I do not enter on any 
theological argument to sustain the plain sense of 
the words of St. Paul, "Wherefore we conclude 
that a man is justified by faith without the works 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 53 

of the law." But I say to every one who is 
beginning' to stir in his bondage and pine for 
freedom, pray God that the hour may come when, 
it may be in anguish of heart over the wreck 
of all your worldly hopes, you are brought to 
cry, "What things were gain to me, those I 
have counted loss for Christ ; yea doubtless and 
I count all things but loss for the excellency of 
the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord : for 
whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and 
do count them but dung that I may win Christ, 
and be found in Him, not having on mine own 
righteousness, which is of the law; but that which 
is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness 
which is of God by faith." 

The time will come when it will be revealed to 
you that, unless your salvation rests on a Divine 
Work, it rests on a basis of sand : that unless 
your righteousness is God's righteousness, it can 
never bear the blaze of celestial sunlight ; that 
unless your life is the Divine life, the heavenly 
air will wear and waste it to a wreck. A God- 
Man must your leader be, and a Divine deliver- 
ance must He work. Shut up between Migdol 
and the sea, you will one day look back with 
dread on pursuing Egypt, forward to the moan- 
ing sea with despair ; and unless your soul, 
emptied of self-trust, yet most trustful — cleared 



54 OUT OF EGYPT 



of worldly hopes, yet most hopeful — can stand 
still and see the salvation of Christ, " of Christ 
Jesus and Him crucified," that valley will he the 
grave of your soul. But there, in the agony of 
despair, is the Divine deliverance; for, "when 
there was no eye to pity, His eye pitied ; when 
there was no arm to save, His right hand and 
His holy arm wrought salvation." Stand still ! 
not here in Egypt, among the flesh-pots ; hut 
there, on Calvary, amid the deepening gloom, 
hy what seems to he the grave of a world's hope, 
and see the salvation of God. 

5. The last feature of the exodus which I 
dwell upon is the free, broad desert ; the world, 
the universe before them ; a broad, deep sea flow- 
ing between them and the land of bondage ; and 
their tyrants dead upon the shore. 

If you have ever come forth out of some deadly 
agony — from watching the death-struggle and the 
victory of life in one most dear— battling with 
winds and storms on a reef in the wild ocean 
— or some commercial crisis through which you 
dreaded that the fabric of your fortunes, which 
you had been years in building, would melt like 
a wave from under your feet — you may share 
the joy of those redeemed ones when they stood 
free in the wilderness, watched the broad sun- 
light gleaming on the track by which they were 



HAVE I CALLED MY SOX. 55 

to journey to their land of promise, and then- 
tyrants dead upon the shore. A broad sea swept 
between them and Egypt for ever. The gate by 
which they had passed to liberty was locked, by 
God's own terrible hand, against the pursuit of 
even the most daring foes. " Here, then, is free- 
dom. The air is bright, the scene is grand and 
inspiring; here we can live as men, and be free.' 7 
Do not be misled by the word desert. As I shall 
prove to you in my next discourse, there is very 
much that is sublime, very much that is soft and 
beautiful, in that wilderness. Life there was harder 
than in Egpyt, but nobler ; though not harder — 
not so hard — as that of our Scandinavian fore- 
fathers ; the grandest race that has ever quickened 
the flow of the life-blood of our world ! To see 
the stormy armies that were closing round them, 
tossed as the sport of the stormier sea ; to know 
that Egypt had met with such an overthrow as 
would guard them for ages from any assault ; to 
see that all before them was their own, that by 
that shore the past chapter of their captivity was 
sealed up for ever, and that they commenced a 
new life-course from that hour ; these were the 
springs of the joy which inspired that magnificent 
hymn, which rang over the waters their last fare- 
well to the land of their toils and tears ; and 
this joy of the Lord was to be their strength 



56 OUT OF EGYPT 

through the wilderness, and bear them, as on 
eagles' wings, to their own beautiful and glorious 
land. 

And so, when the burden of your guilt and 
w T retchedness rolls off before the Cross on Cal- 
vary, when the deep sea of the Divine forgiving 
love sweeps over the past and obliterates its 
shame, when you lift with the arm of a freeman 
the consecrated banner, and cry, " Christ is my 
Leader, the free wilderness is before me, and 
Heaven ! " such joy shall thrill in your heart as 
shall burst forth in music, which may mingle 
with the harpings of the seraphim before the 
throne of God and the Lamb. 

Oh, the glorious sense of liberty, of wealth, of 
life, which gushes up in the heart of the man 
who has made the exodus, and sees his tyrant 
taskmasters dead behind him on the shore ! The 
devil ? He is a beaten foeman ; Christ shattered 
his throne and seized his spoils when he cried 
out, " It is finished,' ' " and ascended up on high, 
leading captivity captive." The world ? The 
plagues of God have stripped it of its beauty, 
the painted and jewelled wanton is made bare, 
and we loathe what once was our lust. Sorrows, 
toils, struggles ? We hail them. A free man 
exalts in the manly exercise that is wasting to 
a slave. We glory in tribulations, we delight 



HAVE I CALLED MY SON. 57 

in toil, we leap to conflict. Discipline is our life. 
And Death ? See we not Him who grappled 
with the grisly Terror, and tore the iron crown 
from his brow ? With a song, then, through 
Christ, we affront him ; we pass with a victor's 
step before the prison-house where he rules in 
chains. " death, where is thy sting ? grave, 
where is thy victory ? The sting of death is sin, 
the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to 
God who giveth us the victory through our Lord 
Jesus Christ." 



58 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 



mrmm ni 

The Way of the Wilderness. 

" But God led the people about, through the way of the 
ivildemess of the Red Sea." — Exod. xiii. 18. 

These words expound to us a whole philosophy 
of life. The Way of the Wilderness has become 
a household word in Christendom, and this 
decision of Jehovah is the proclamation of the 
law of man's earthly life. It repeats, substan- 
tially on the same grounds, and for the same 
reasons, the first sentence on the man who had 
made himself a slave by sin. My text is a new 
and illustrated comment on the words, " And unto 
Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened to 
the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree 
of which I commanded thee saying, Thou shalt 
not eat of it : cursed is the ground for thy sake ; 
in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy 
life : thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth 
to thee ; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field ; 
in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till 
thou return unto the ground ; for out of it wast 
thou taken ; for dust thou art, and unto dust 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 59 

shalt thou return." Gen. iii. 17-19. Read also 
Exodus xiii. 17 — 22. These passages should he 
read together, for together they explain the toils, 
struggles, sufferings, and desert wanderings of 
this our life. 

Palestine is the England of the East.* It is 
the only natural home in those regions of a free, 
independent, industrious, and noble people. 
Cyrus expressed a deep truth, which is one of the 
chief keys to human history, when he said sadly, 
after the settlement of his hardy Persians in the 
rich Mesopotamia!! plains, " The soil which 
nourishes such fruits and flowers will not nourish 
warriors." This relation between the people and 
their home had more to do than any careless 
student of history would suppose, with the 
strength and liberty, the prosperity and glory of 
the most remarkable race which has ever played 
its part on the great theatre of the world. 

Palestine presents a most striking contrast to 
the physical character of both Egypt and Meso- 
potamia. Their rich soft luxuriant plains, their 
tame and monotonous outlines, threw up in more 
striking relief the brilliant variety of the hills and 
the valleys, the brooks and the rivers, the mea- 
dows and the terraced mountain slopes of Canaan. 

* A decided likeness, especially to the northern regions of 
England, has been discerned by many observant travellers. 



60 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

The vast plain of Mesopotamia offered no variety, 
the ranges of mountains were too distant to enter 
as living features into the composition of the 
landscape. It was the dreariest of all monotones 
— a rich one. In Egypt the monotony was of a 
different hut as complete a character. The land 
of Egypt was a narrow strip of the richest and 
greenest land conceivable, following the course 
of the river for more than five hundred miles, 
the river neither gaining nor losing much in 
breadth or swiftness ; for it receives no tributaries 
from the point, on the borders of Nubia, where it 
issues forth from its first Cataract, to the broad 
Delta through which it discharges its waters into 
the bosom of the Mediterranean. This narrow 
belt of soil, the average breadth of which is 
hardly more than seven miles, is flanked on either 
side by a range of most bare and desolate lime- 
stone mountains, whose plateaus are arid wastes, 
whose cataracts and avalanches are streams of 
sand. For some hundreds of miles these level 
ranges enclose the river; above Thebes, the sand- 
stone crosses them, and about the quarries of 
Silsilis lends, at any rate, the variety of brilliant 
colour to the monotony of the narrow mountain 
gorge, in the hollow of which green Egypt lies. 
The range of the sandstone is but small ; it soon 
yields place to the granite of Nubia, which, wild 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 61 

and grand as the long level limestone table moun- 
tains are tame and expressionless, forms the 
southern boundary of the most prolific region of 
the earth. But the granite region is beyond the 
boundary of Egypt proper, and its children play 
but slight part in her history. 

Thus, in every direction around Palestine, in 
the contiguous habitable countries, there is a 
somewhat dreary monotony in the landscape, 
and a luxuriant, almost wanton, productiveness 
in the land ; two conditions as unfit for the un- 
folding of the higher and more godlike part of 
humanity as can well be conceived. Palestine, 
on the other hand, presented a winning variety, 
both of form and expression : every hill, every 
valley, every village, had its distinct feature of 
character and beauty whereby it was known and 
loved. The land received its people as a bride, 
and they entered it with a lover's eagerness. 
Eead the Song of Solomon, if you would see 
how every nook and corner of the country was 
laden, to the eye of a Jew, with an expression of 
human beauty. You might search long the 
records of Mesopotamia or Egypt for such a wit- 
ness of the character and charm of their land. 
Moreover, it was a country of mountain passes 
and narrow defiles. Each range of mountain was 
a battlement, each pass might be made a Ther- 



62 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

mopyiae by a free and determined people, as 
Maccabseus proved. It was a home worth de- 
fending, and probably more easy to be defended 
by a small but courageous people than any other 
portion of that region of the world. The vast 
monotony, the soft wanton air, the cloudless 
skies, the luxuriant herbage of Egypt, formed a 
background, which served as a relief to Palestine 
in the memory of the people. For slaves, Egypt 
might be the meet and sufficient habitation ; 
but out of Egypt, into such a home as Canaan, 
God must call His sons. But by what road ? 
" And God led them not through the wag of the land 
of the Philistines, although that was near ; hut God 
led the people about through the zvay of the wilder* 
ness of the Bed Sea." From Etham, on the edge 
of the wilderness, there were Wo roads to Canaan. 
The one in a north-easterly direction, across the 
great northern limestone plateau of the desert, to 
the southernmost city of Palestine ; the way by 
which Jacob " went down," and by which his 
funeral procession " went up " to lay him in the 
grave of his fathers. From Ramses to Gaza is a 
journey of about ten clays. The way is easy, 
rapid, and safe ; but it was not the route selected 
by Moses, under the guidance of the Lord. The 
other route I will endeavour in a few words to 
describe. 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 63 

From the lieacl of the Bed Sea it takes a south- 
easterly course towards the lofty range of moun- 
tains which occupy the triangle, hounded on two 
sides by the Gulfs of Suez and Akaba ; and on the 
third or northern side, by an irregular sandy 
plain, which divides the great mountain region 
from the vast monotonous limestone tract which 
forms the desert between Palestine and Egypt, 
and which has its slope steadily towards the 
Mediterranean Sea. 

The mountains which occupy the angle of the 
peninsula approach in their highest peaks 10,000 
feet above the sea level; and it is through the 
ravines about their northern slopes, and the 
broken, sandy tract which sweeps almost in a 
semi-circle from Suez to Edom, between the 
sandstone and granite on the one hand, and the 
limestone region of El Tih on the other, that the 
way of the wilderness lies from Egypt to Pales- 
tine — entering it by the south-east, on the shores 
of the Dead Sea. I will endeavour to condense 
the [accounts of the most intelligent students of 
the physical geography of this region whose 
v/orks I have met with, and give you, as far as I 
can, a general notion of it in a few words. 

The ^central mountain chain of Syria, the 
Lebanon, falls off to the south into "the rolling 
limestone hills " of Judea, and, continuing its 



64 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

course towards Africa, forms a vast desert plateau 
of an average elevation of two thousand feet : 
this is the desert between Palestine and Egypt, 
to which I have referred. This table-land, very 
dreary and monotonous in expression, occupies 
the whole country, from near the Mediterranean 
on the north, to the broad sandy valley on the 
south, which separates the long horizontal line 
of limestone mountains supporting the desert 
plateau from the angle of the peninsula occupied 
by the range of Sinai. By the great desert 
valley, which sweeps round by a grand circuit 
between the limestone on the left and the bolder 
sandstone and granite formations on the right, 
from the head of the Gulf of Suez to Akaba, the 
children of Israel journeyed with their armies. 
The left, or northern, side of this "Debbet-er- 
Eamleh " has little character or variety — it is the 
old limestone rampart of the Nile valley prolonged 
into the desert, with mainly the same features ; 
but on the southern side the traveller finds a 
scene of strange grandeur, of awful sublimity, 
not perhaps to be paralleled by any other moun- 
tain region in the world. In many very im- 
portant points, its features are unique. It is a 
mountain range of a twofold character. The 
chain which immediately fronts the traveller, as 
he takes his departure from the Egyptian edge of 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 65 

the wilderness, is of rich red sandstone, singu- 
larly varied and magnificent in colour, which, 
running down from the desert east of Jordan by 
Edom, traverses the peninsula of Sinai, and, 
crossing the Gulf of Suez, reappears in Upper 
Egypt, in about latitude 26° N., where it forms 
the quarry of many of the most magnificent cities 
and temples in the land. This narrow belt 
of sandstone mountain, all aglow, if not ablaze, 
with colour, excites the enthusiasm of every 
observant traveller. From the way in which it 
is described to us by men whose eye is evidently 
to be trusted, we are led to believe that nothing 
more splendid, in point of colour, is to be met 
with even in the most favoured regions of the 
world. But this is no more than the outwork of 
the granite range of Sinai, which tosses its black 
and jagged peaks into the clear air beyond. The 
rock of Sinai is granite and porphyry. We meet 
with it again in Nubia, throttling the Nile in its 
narrow gorge at Syene, where it forms the quarry 
out of which sphinx and obelisk had been carved 
in successive ages, in monotonous repetition, which 
is Egyptian to the heart's core. 

In the Sinaitic peninsula this granite system is 
remarkable for its stern sublimity, its awful still- 
ness, its singular resonance, and for the few lovely 
valleys which nestle in its deep recesses, clothed 

5 



66 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

with the richest verdure, and adorned, if not with 
stately, with shadowing palms. Along the base 
of this wild region the pilgrim of the desert 
passes, having the low limestone plateau on his 
left, and on his right the bolder sandstone, 
crowned by the sublime peaks of Serbal and 
Sinai, with frequent and exquisite glimpses of 
the blue Gulfs of Suez and Akaba on either 
hand. It is the way of the wilderness from Suez 
to Palestine ; and I imagine, after some study 
of what travellers of various lands have said about 
it, one of the most striking and impressive routes 
in the world. 

I do not wish to anticipate the description 
of the desert scenes which will illustrate the 
successive stations, whose moral meanings and 
lessons we have to trace. I simply wish to 
present to you a glimpse of its broad features, 
that we may enter more fully into the reason for 
which it was selected as the way of the children 
of God. I have said something on the general 
geological character of the region — that is, its 
skeleton ; now let me give you some general notion 
of its aspect — that is, the way in which its bones 
are clothed with flesh. It will be*needful, as the 
lawyers say, to dismiss from your minds the 
notions which naturally associate themselves with 
the word desert. We generally understand by 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 67 

the word, broad, desolate, arid tracts of sand. 
If you read the Pentateuch, you will find the 
allusions to sand singularly few. The people 
suffered little or nothing from the sands of the 
desert. The fact is, — and as Dr. Stanley well 
observes, it affords a valuable negative testimony 
to the truth of the narrative, — that sand is the 
exception in the desert of Sinai. Such sand- 
wastes as are found in the deserts of Lybia, are 
here unknown. The word most commonly em- 
ployed to describe this region means literally "the 
pasture.'' " The pastures of the wilderness " are 
celebrated in the Psalms. The term describes the 
broad open waste which affords pasture sufficient 
for a nomad tribe wandering with their flocks. 
Everywhere along the track which I have de- 
scribed, you meet with a thin and scanty vegeta- 
tion ; while, here and there, are scenes of splen- 
did beauty and luxuriance ,where a great people 
might encamp and live in plenty through succes- 
sive years. 

These scenes of beauty, these oases of acacia, 
tamarisk, and palm, are rare. Travellers reckon 
but three, of any importance, between Suez and 
Edom ; but there is ample evidence that in the 
desert of Sinai, as in the inner recesses of Switzer- 
land,* nature has been growing more savage and 

* I was much struck by the observation of a Griadelwald 

6—2 



68 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

barren for ages ; that as man's courage and 
strength have compelled her to yield her habitable 
parts to his dominion, she has made her wastes 
more barren and desolate. I cannot stay to dwell 
at length on the proofs ; but there is ample evi- 
dence that the desert, when Israel crossed it, 
though presenting the same general features 
which meet the eye of the modern traveller, was 
more rich in wood, water, and verdure than now. 
Within the memory of man, vast palm groves 
have disappeared. Of the acacia (Shittim-wood) , 
of which there was sufficient in the region of 
Sinai to make the whole framework of the taber- 
nacle, hardly a trace remains. About Eephidim, 
Amalek — a strong people manifestly — strove with 
Moses and his nation, where now a few Bedouins 
can hardly find pastures for their flocks. It was 
a waste then as now, incapable of cultivation ; but 
more richly clad with verdure, and offering more 
numerous stations where, in the lap of plenty and 
beauty, a great multitude might rest. 

Murmuring against the barrenness of the waste 
is not the chronic disease of the pilgrim-nation, 
it is rather an acute symptom at rare intervals ; 

pastor, whose hospitality I once enjoyed, that natnre in that 
region is becoming more savage every year. The old road 
across the great plateau of the Oberland from Grindelwald to 
the Vallais, is quite lost. 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 69 

and this testifies to the general sufficiency of the 
desert supplies, and tolerableness of the desert 
life. I regard this as a point of very large im- 
portance, because it presents a striking analogy 
between that desert and the way of man's pil- 
grimage until the present day. God leads none 
of us by the rapid and easy path to knowledge, 
fortune, or happiness. We all of us travel by a 
path which has long stretches of barren and weary 
march, and here and there only soft resting-places, 
flashing like emeralds on the diadem of the desert, 
where we may wait and sleep and play awhile, 
before we gird up our loins and pursue our toil- 
some way. There is a Debbet-er-Kamleh of 
grammar, arithmetic and logic, between the young 
school-boy and his Canaan of knowledge. I sup- 
pose you are not altogether in love with your 
daily tasks, whose monotony becomes wearisome ; 
but they must be done before you can ungird and 
lie clown in some oasis of social communion, and 
live for the moment a life whose sensation is bliss. 
I say the oases are few, but, brethren, they are 
sure. No true pilgrim can miss them. Not more 
surely did Israel find sufficient though scanty 
pasture through the whole desert way, with oases 
of beauty and plenty at due intervals, than does 
man find his bread sure under the hardest circum- 
stances, with appointed seasons of joy and even 



70 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

rapture; mounting up, in the holiest and most 
pilgrim-like, to the " joys unspeakable and full of 
glory." The short way might bring us to rest 
and glory sooner, but the rest would relax, and 
the glory blind us. We travel by a longer, harder 
path; that muscle may be disciplined by toil, 
courage assured by conquest, and self-govern- 
ment studied in many a season of shame and 
pain. Then the crown will fit us, rest will be 
calm and noble activity, and glory we shall wear 
like kings. 

Such is the broad general reason of the way of 
the wilderness to Canaan. When we come to 
examine it more in detail, we shall find every- 
where suggestions which explain and justify God's 
method in the ordering of our lives. The text 
gives an indication, but not an explanation. There 
was a clear reason why they should not go by the 
way of the sea, which the dullest could compre- 
hend. The Philistines were there, a powerful 
confederate people. The conquest of Canaan 
would be too great an enterprise for a disor- 
ganized company of escaped slaves. God is the 
author of order in the Church and everywhere. 
His miraculous hand but makes the order of His 
ways more sure. The disciplined only can win 
and hold a kingdom. To be disciplined they 
went forth — to grow into a nation, to be trained 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 71 

to war, to be nursed to a noble manhood, and 
then they would be able to fulfil the great counsel 
of God. Among the special reasons of their 
guidance by that path, the following may be 
noted : — 

I. They had been sated with the magnificence 
of man's works ; God led them forth into the 
wilderness to show them His works in their 
native grandeur, and to refresh their exhausted 
hearts and spirits by the vision of the splendour 
of His world. 

The desert is, geographically, the mediator be- 
tween Egypt and Canaan, and in its physical 
features it partakes strangely the character of 
both. In the wilderness they learnt to mark and 
cherish the physical features of their habitation — 
a great step in the development of beings who 
had been used to the rich but wearying monotony 
of the Delta of the Nile. They saw both the 
sublime and the beautiful in nature, and they 
acquired a touch both of strength and softness 
which was the first rudiment of the education of 
their souls. In Egypt they had seen the marvels 
of mans handiwork. The pyramids were already 
built, and clear from base to summit ; and there 
the sphinx stood sentinel — a long avenue of the 
most vast and impressive sculptures in the world. 
They saw those scenes in all their splendour, 



72 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

whose faded glories men now make long pilgrim- 
ages to behold. And then God led them forth 
where they might see His temples, His pyramids 
and obelisks of granite and porphyry, His pomp 
of colour, and all the mystery and splendour of 
His construction of the world. There can be 
little question that the great Egyptian monu- 
ments borrowed their sublime forms from the 
types of nature. The pyramids and obelisks of 
the granite range of Nubia suggested the monu- 
ments of Memphis and On. An obelisk stands 
there still, amid the ruins of On, which shot its 
delicate shaft into the brilliant air that morning 
when Joseph wedded the daughter of Potipherah, 
and penetrated the mysteries of the temple of 
the Sun. Egypt copied God's works on a scale 
of matchless grandeur, and then fell down to 
worship them ; and God led his people forth 
to see the Divine originals, and worship in 
their solemn presences not the creature, but its 
Lord. 

The glorious range of Horeb, blazing with 
more brilliant colours than ever Egypt knew : 
the black, jagged mountain peaks — one of them 
virgin still — rent and tossed in the most massive, 
impressive confusion ; the palm-groves nestling 
in their deep recesses, and the torrents, though 
rarely, rushing down their channelled flanks, 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 73 

tuned the spirit of the people to a higher key- 
note than had been struck in Egypt, and com- 
menced, in purifying awe and stimulating wonder, 
the education of their souls. 

An extended knowledge of nature has always 
attended — I do not say caused — all the great 
eras of the outburst of the human intellect and 
spirit. It were a curious question to consider 
what the conquest of the East did for the 
Augustan age of the Empire ; what the Crusades, 
regarded as mere discoveries of a larger world, 
did for the awakening European life of the 
13th century, and what the discovery of a new 
and wondrously beautiful hemisphere did for the 
imagination and practical force of the men of 
Elizabeth's day. And so God led His people 
forth into the desert to see His rock-built palaces 
and temples ; to hear the even fall amid the 
breathless silence of the wilderness, to watch 
the sunlight burning on the sublime peaks of 
Serbal or Sinai, and then touching with a softer, 
tenderer lustre each point and slope, till it 
flashed gaily in the dewdrops which gemmed 
the desert verdure at their feet ; and there they 
learnt how solemn is life, how wonderful is 
nature, how awful and glorious is God. Egypt 
had killed this sense, which had been quick in 
the breast of their patriarch sires ; God regene- 



74 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

rated it under the peaks of Sinai, and consecrated 
it to Himself. 

And God has this vision for us. Twenty years 
ago, we were tempted to complain that science 
was stripping the mantle of wonder off creation ; 
and in that marvellous book of wisdom, Sartor 
Resartus, our Cato complains, " It has come 
about that now, to many a royal society, the 
creation of a world is little more mysterious than 
the cooking of a dumpling; concerning which 
last, indeed, there have been minds to whom the 
question, hoiv the apples ivere got in, suggested 
difficulties." But the process is like scaling the 
outer crust of the gem or shell. Science has 
unfolded beneath, new marvels, new glories, before 
which the boldest and most self-sufficient are 
compelled to bow. God has filled the world with 
forms, hues, tones, which are an everlasting 
wonder, if we will go forth to enjoy them ; and 
which will tend, if we live with them much and 
lovingly, to keep pure and simple our easily 
bewildered and sophisticated hearts. Nature is a 
book which would confound the world's wisdom if 
earnestly read. How small our passions amid 
the strife of elements ; how petty our fancies and 
follies under the solemn canopy of the stars ! 
God leads us as He led them, where we can see all 
this and be rebuked and silenced; and blush with 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 7o 

shame at our beggarly idolatries, when we know 
the name of Him who built and adorned the world. 

II. God led them forth by the way of the 
wilderness, that He might reveal not nature only 
but Himself. 

God sought to lead no tumultuous, uncultured 
rabble to Canaan, but a people knowing them- 
selves and knowing Him. A rabble they were 
when they came out of Egypt, with all the follies 
and vices of a rabble ; when they entered Canaan 
they were an organized nation of disciplined, self- 
controlled, resistless men. He led them into the 
wilderness as He leads us, that He might meet with 
them, speak with them, reveal Himself to them, and 
teach them to know themselves in knowing Him. 

"Who is the Lord?" was their cry when 
Moses came to them. The life in the wilder- 
ness was the answer. Ea — Ptah — Kneph — these 
are no gods, mighty as are their images and 
splendid as are their fanes. The Lord, on that 
awful night when He led them forth from Egypt, 
destroyed their reverence for Egypt's gods for 
ever." When He planted their feet on the free 
soil of the desert, He began to make known to 
them His power, character, and name. His 
word brought the deluge of waters over the flower 

* Even in their lapse into idolatry, Aaron " proclaimed a 
feast Unto the Lord." 



76 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

of the Egyptian forces; His visible splendour 
marked out their mysterious way; His hand 
spread the manna under the dewy veil on the 
bosom of the waste, and drew from "the flinty 
rock" the living stream, to supply, purely and 
freshly, their daily needs. His voice thundered 
on Sinai, and declared a law to them ; His finger 
traced, on the tables of stone, the fundamental 
basis of a moral society ; He expounded the 
sanctions of right and the meaning of truth ; 
He made them know, as no nation before or 
since has known, that all the force of world and 
devil cannot stay the man who is in the Lord's 
highway of duty; that curses cannot wither nor 
enchantments entangle him ; that the very stars in 
their courses fight for him, and confound his foes. 
To give room and time for this revelation, the 
Lord led them round by Sinai, as He leads us 
round the wilderness of the world. He takes 
us "round" by ways of toil and want, that we 
may learn to know Him as the master of our 
tasks, and the husband of our need. He brings 
us to sorrow and bitter complaining, that He 
may work for us — while every sense is strained 
to w T atch it — a deliverance greater than our 
dreams. He leads us, conscience-stung, to the 
mountain of testimony, that we may learn the 
awful form of duty, the sacred limits of life ; and 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 77 

sends us forth, as He sent Israel, men full-armed 
for the moral conflict — wise, strong, resolute, 
unconquerable, because knowing ourselves, our 
way, our work, and Him. 

III. God led them into the wilderness, that He 
might there cultivate their manly qualities, and 
fit them to hold the possessions they might win. 

Discretion comes by experience, experience by 
endurance of pains and toils. He led them, by 
this way, " to prove them, and see what was in 
their heart." He needed not to know ; He fore- 
cast their character. But He wished them "to 
know themselves, and to know that He knew 
them, that He might place their relations with 
Himself on a firm basis of wisdom and truth. 
When they passed out of Egypt, they were the 
weakest and most impatient of peoples ; when 
they passed into Canaan, they were the strongest 
and most enduring. A comparison of Num- 
bers xiv. and Joshua i. will make this abundantly 
plain. This development was the work of the 
wilderness; they had to be educated there to 
win and to hold the Promised Land. How nobly 
does Paul develop this thought, in Galatians iv. 
1-9! This is the key to the history — " The 
child under tutors and governors, until the time 
appointed of the Father ; " we shall have to use 
it again and again to unlock the meaning of the 



78 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

wilderness life. To spare a child the toils and 
pains of education, is the most grievous wrong 
that a father can inflict on him. Thus did not 
God spare His sons ! From the day when they 
sang their triumphal hymn upon the desert 
shore, to the day when they " passed over 
Jordan," their life was one continued disci- 
pline : each station, each experience, had a dis- 
tinct office in relation to the formation of their 
character; was sent to add to them a virtue which 
would be an instrument of conquest or govern- 
ment, and a spring of strength, not in time only, 
but eternity. Not simply to keep them out of 
the way of the Philistines, but to drill them till 
they could master their enemies ; to nurse them 
till they could bring forth a Samson, a David, 
who could compel the Philistines to own their 
supremacy, He led them by Sinai, and trained 
them, by self-conquest, to conquer the strongest 
foes. They came at last on Canaan, not as a 
scattered band of marauders, but with the shock 
of a thunderbolt : you feel that the battle is won 
the first moment that they set their feet on the 
land. And those men in the desert, hard as was 
their way and fare, were making history. Bimsen 
says, — " History was born that night, when Moses 
led forth his people from Goshen." The narra- 
tive of their toils and struggles is the oldest and 



THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 79 

most precious of historic records, and their way- 
book has become the heirloom of the pilgrim world. 
" Behold, we count them happy which endure." 

And you who are out in the wilderness, faith- 
less and heartless, like a sailor on a dark sea unlit 
by stars, learn from Israel the grand reason of 
your pilgrim vocation, and the end to which it 
will be guided if you follow the highway of God. 
God finds you a slave : He would make you a 
son. You are not the lawful slave of wanton 
Egypt ; you have the King's mark upon you, — 
the King of kings is waiting to redeem His own. 
Come forth, then, come forth to freedom ! breathe 
the free air, scan the broad horizon — it is your 
land of wandering ; see the soft blue hills swelling 
in the distance, the gleaming of rivers, the shadow 
of woodlands — it is your land of rest. 

One word, in conclusion. The desert was the 
vestibule of Canaan ; life — not the Egypt, but the 
wilderness of life — is the vestibule of heaven. 
The scenery of the desert was the transition 
from the paralysing monotony of Egypt to the 
stimulating variety of Palestine. Learning how 
to live in the desert, they w r ere learning how 
to live in a more beautiful and wealthy land. 
Not a day of their discipline could be spared. 
There was not an act of their wilderness life 
which was not a preparation for their home. Let 



80 THE WAY OF THE WILDERNESS. 

it consecrate life and the world to your appre- 
hension, and make all the deed and patience 
of the present sacred, to know that it bears a 
great future in its breast. There is not a line 
of form, a tinge of colour, a tone of sound which 
you reverently study here, which is not giving 
you the key to the forms, the hues, the harmonies 
of celestial worlds. All that is grand and beau- 
tiful on earth is an apocalypse, a glimpse through 
the veil, of the pomp and beauty of eternity. 
These earthly things, from the blade of grass that 
crisps beneath your footsteps, to the Alp, that 
hides its maiden peak in the white bosom of the 
skies, are but images ; their ideal forms are the 
realities of God's kingdom on high. The stripes 
of chastisement, the sobbings of the new-born 
spirit, the tears, the wailings, have their counter- 
parts there, in crowns, in joys, in songs. Live 
boldly, then, and freely, like the king's heirs in 
the wilderness ; make all the beauty and blessing 
of this broad world your own : and the day cometh 
when you shall pass with solemn joy, with fami- 
liar boldness, into a wider universe, bathed in the 
lustre of a more glorious sun. "Corae, ye blessed 
of my Father," ye who have sustained the toils 
and learnt the lessons of the wilderness, "inherit 
the kingdom prepared for you from before the 
foundation of the world." 



marah: the well of bitterness. 81 



Marah : the Well of Bitterness. 

" So Moses brought Israel from the Red Sea, and they went 
out into the wilderness of Shur ; and they went three days in the 
wilderness, and found no water. And when they came to Marah, 
they could not drink of the waters of Marah, for they were bitter: 
therefore the name of it was called Marah. And the people 
murmured against Moses, saying, What shall we drink?" — 
Exod. xv. 22-24. 

God led His sons by the way of the wilderness, 
because it was capable of being the theatre of a 
nobler, purer, freer life than they could have lived 
in Egypt; than they could have lived, till dis- 
ciplined, in Canaan. There was room for a man 
to breathe there, and work, and prepare himself 
by the development of all his nobler faculties to 
take a high part in all the great battles of the 
Lord. The word, as I have said, employed to 
describe the region means " the pastures/' sug- 
gesting anything but thoughts of desolation and 
death. Waste it is in one sense, but everywhere 
clothed with a thin vegetation, brightening, as 
often occurs in limestone regions, wherever a 
spring gushes up from its not utterly arid bosom , 

6 



82 MARAH 



into some of the fairest, richest, sunniest pastures 
which deck the mantle of our world. The moun- 
tain passes — for there are such between Suez and 
Edom — with all their rich variety of scenery, are 
peculiarly bold and splendid; most elevating to 
the spirit of a nomad people, who had been nursed 
in the lap of luxuriant wanton Egypt, to the 
dulness and carelessness of slaves. The points of 
beauty and interest are rare, but most rich when 
reached. I know not that it is otherwise in life. 
It is a full repayment for the toil of days of weary 
march over burning plains, to rest beneath the 
palm groves of Feiran, to wander amid the glens of 
Mount Serbal, or from the peak of Sinai to sweep 
the horizon of one of the most glorious prospects 
in the world. God loves not monotony and bar- 
renness. These are not characteristic of the homes 
of his elect races : and let us be sure that the 
land of the pilgrimage of his first-born had scenes 
of interest and features of fitness not easily to be 
matched upon this earth. Mark you, it was no 
Eden. Of that their first day's journey into the 
wilderness gave unmistakeable witness. And earth 
is no Eden ; but seamed and scarred though it be 
with the lava-floods of evil, it is laker still to 
heaven than to hell. And this wilderness was the 
vestiouie of Canaan; its free broad horizon, its 
hills and mountain peaks, its rare but exquisite 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 83 



valleys, its springs and winter torrents, were in 
contrast with Egypt, in concord with Canaan. 
These were the first buddings of the beauties of 
Palestine ; their first vision of the land of rich 
freedom and variety in which God meant them to 
spend their glorious days. It was no scene of 
prison discipline, but of manly education; no 
home of mean furniture and narrow resources, 
but rather of stimulating varieties and brave ex- 
citements ; the meet training-ground of the race 
who were to guard the palladium of the law and 
the liberty of man, amid those enervating Eastern 
climates where despots lorded it easily over herds 
of slaves. The wilderness offered a fair field for 
a freeman's education ; each moment, he would 
have impressed upon him that his maintenance 
was in his own hand, and under God's. The indi- 
vidualizing process, which is the necessary prepa- 
ration for a high communion, would go on there 
with singular rapidity. Each man would be edu- 
cated to take thought for himself and his depen- 
dants; while the common lot of so great a company, 
their common sufferings, dangers, and deliverances, 
would nurse their nationality and develop their 
common, pari passu with their individual life. No- 
where on earth probably, could a bondman be 
trained so readily to be a freeman and the mem- 
ber of a nation, as in that wilderness. 

6—2 



84 MARAH : 



It was, moreover, as I have said, the vestibule 
of Canaan, more like beautiful and fruitful Pales- 
tine, with all its wasteness, than was Egypt with 
all its fertility ; much as this fair earth with its 
soft beauties and shining splendours, its meadows 
and mountains, its morning brilliance and tender 
evening shadows, is the vestibule of heaven. The 
earth was cursed for Adam's sake ; but, like the 
wilderness, it had left in it vestiges neither faint 
nor few of Eden. The rains break up the images 
of stars and snow-peaks in the clear bosom of a 
mountain lakelet ; but watch well the broken 
mirror, and you will find strangely beautiful and 
even perfect vestiges of the image which has been 
destroyed. And thus, too, the pomp and the 
splendour of our home, the flush of dawn and 
the sunset glow, the clear stars and the gleaming 
flowers, the broad snow-fields in their pure white- 
ness, and the virgin peaks which shoot up from 
their bosom to lose themselves in the veils of 
heaven, are images, broken images, but strangely 
beautiful and true, of the glories of that heaven 
of heavens which our sunlight doth not quicken, 
and where we shall see the heavenly models after 
which all that this world holds was made. This 
great world of ours has dreary monotonies — broad 
blank plains, steppes, and deserts, which are the 
wandering grounds of our commoA life ; here and 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 85 

there, like the desert of Sinai, it has oases of 
sparkling freshness and beauty, which light up 
the dulness of our daily marches, and bear witness 
of other worlds. 

Forth then into such a wilderness, through 
stormy walls of waters, the Children of Israel 
passed with their armies. " Egypt, farewell for 
ever ! Come toil, come struggle, come want, we 
are pledged to a freeman's march through the 
wilderness, to seek our ancient freeman's home.' , 
This was the spirit of the exodus, the spirit which 
inspired Miriam's hymn. And now we picture 
them to ourselves as they stand ranged in ranks 
on the shore of deliverance, filling the broken 
plain which lies between the range of limestone 
mountains, supporting the great central plateau 
of the desert, and the sea. Doubtless there was 
something in the freedom and breadth of the 
desert landscape which exhilarated and inspired 
them ; something, too, in its monotony and vast- 
ness which impressed them with a sense of the 
solemnity of the life on which they were entering, 
and its dependence upon God. Through the first 
day's march the novelty of the scene, the fresh- 
ness of their experience, sustained and cheered 
them. The deep blue waters of the gulf, crested 
with foam, would lie to the right hand of the 
host ; and ever and anon we can fancy a bright 



86 MARAH : 



band of youths and maidens darting forth on to 
the sands where lay the wreck of the army of 
their foes, and making the very air palpitate with 
the chorus, " Sing unto the Lord, for He hath 
triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider hath 
He cast into the sea." Moses and the leaders 
would hold on their careful way. The great mass 
of the host would doubtless follow patiently in 
their tracks ; but on either hand, we can imagine, 
the more adventurous would spread out upon the 
shore or in the desert, exploring the wonders of 
the new world into which they had been led forth 
so mightily by the right hand of God. 

Some impression of the character of their first 
days' experience may be gathered from the words 
of a recent traveller by the same route : — 

" Towards noon we left the shade of the old 
palm, and launched out upon the scorching waste. 
From a slight rise of sandhills, a burning region 
spread out before us ; an irregular plain of sand 
and gravel, extending from the foot of the moun- 
tains Er-Bahab, which support the great inland 
central plateau of the desert, down to the shores 
of the sea ; its surface is indented slightly by 
occasional wadies or valleys, here merely irregular 
depressions in the level, caused by the passage of 
the winter floods from the mountains to the sea, 
and clotted by scanty tufts of coarse grass and 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 87 

withered gritty-looking shrubs, which the camels 
in passing generally caught at with avidity, but 
sometimes refused. After the continuance of 
rains, however, these valleys freshen up and afford 
pasturage to the flocks of the neighbouring small 
tribe of Terabin Arabs, whose encampment lies 
beneath a singular and conspicuous peak on the 
left, called Taset Sudr, or the Cup of Sudr, from a 
fountain there. The shipless sea appears on our 
right, and the dark mountains of Attaka beyond, 
w T ith the opening of Wady Tawarik. In one of 
these wadies we encamped at sunset. 

" Oct. 5. — Off before sunrise, commencing the 
labours of a most toilsome day. Plain, mountain 
and wady in a blaze of white heat, ' lie like a load 
on the weary eye,' and seem as if they had just 
passed, all palpitating, through a fiery crucible. 
Truly this beginning of their desert course must 
have appalled the Israelites. We picture them 
toiling over the burning expanse — here., too, we 
learn that they were destitute of water : a fearful 
privation ! In the afternoon we leave this weari- 
some plain, and ascend the first range of the 
white limestone hills, and get peeps of the moun- 
tain region beyond. Winding among these hills, 
at sunset we reached the fountain Howarah, 
and encamped, at a short distance beyond."- — 
Forty Days in the Desert, pp.. 30, 31. 



88 marah : 

In considering the moral meaning of all this, I 
remark, — 

I. That the first day's journey, in spite of the 
splendid scenery of the coasts of the gulf, is pro- 
bably the most wearisome and monotonous of the 
whole way. Sand-storms, white limestone plains, 
the dust caked into a hard surface intensely hot 
and dazzling, no water, no trees — it is as if the 
desert put on its dreariest dress to greet its pil- 
grims, and gave to them at once a full taste of 
the toils and wants which they must endure in 
traversing its wastes. From Marah there is hardly 
a, single day's journey which does not cross the 
track of some green oasis, some well or thin filmy 
stream which clothes itself with verdure, and 
makes itself known from far by its tamarisk or 
palm. But from the shore on which they sang 
their hymn of triumph over their despoiled and 
beaten foes, they went three days' journey into 
the wilderness, and found no water. Whether 
they had filled their skins at the wells now called 
Ayoun Mousa — or, as is probable, since they are 
not mentioned in the narrative, had depended on 
the supplies which they brought with them out of 
Egypt, this terrible three days' journey through 
a land of drought, under a blazing sun, must have 
filled them with dread forebodings and bitter 
regrets. Travellers who know the stations of the 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 89 

wilderness, and when and where they shall come 
upon water, describe the journey through those 
dusty wastes as most disheartening. But this 
people had come out into a strange land : what 
knew they of the springs of Elim and the oasis of 
Paran ? They knew only that they were in the 
wilderness : was this to be its character ? As 
they pressed on in the track of their leader, dust- 
covered, parched, staggering in the blazing heat, 
their very hearts melted within them. Who can 
live in such a desert ? God, in very vengeance on 
our sins and slavishness, hath brought us out into 
this wilderness to die ! 

The first day's journey would probably pass 
cheerfully enough. The novelty, the remembrance 
of their miraculous deliverance, the sense of free- 
dom, and the sight of the deep blue waves rolling 
between them and the land of bondage, would fill 
them with confidence and hope. But, as they 
pressed on during the second day, and found the 
desert grow more waste and parched ; as they lost 
sight of the mountains and the sea behind them, 
and swept the near horizon in front — treeless, life- 
less, and unutterably desolate and repulsive, their 
hearts would sink, and they would exchange ex- 
pressions of distrust of Moses and doubt of God. 
The second night they encamped out under the 
lustrous star-lit tent of their desert home ; and 



90 MARAH : 



they felt, probably, that the next day would decide 
their destiny — that the next night would find them 
at home in the desert, naturalized to its life, or 
dead. The morning broke, and still the treeless 
waste stretched out before them, silent, bare, and 
blank as death. But one feature of the scene as 
they advanced, we may well imagine, cheered them 
to endurance. The far horizon in front was 
bounded, not by a line of level sand, but by sharp 
mountain summits, tossing their peaks into the 
sky in wild disorder, and suggesting irresistibly 
the thought of torrents, glens, the shadow of the 
great rocks, and groves of palms. But for that 
vision of mountains with its rich suggestions, we 
may well question whether they could have en- 
dured. At length a dark line on the bound of the 
horizon took shape as they approached it, and 
palm-trees and a belt of verdure promised water to 
the thirsty host. Not more eagerly does the ship- 
wrecked seaman, floating on a crazy raft at the 
mercy of the waves, strain his sight to catch the 
first white speck in the distance which may be- 
token an approaching sail ; not more earnestly 
does a mother watch the pallid face of an infant 
in a death-crisis of fever, for the first calm breath 
which may tell that life has gained the mastery 
over death, than does the desert pilgrim watch for 
the dark spot on the line of his horizon which 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 91 

tells him that water is within reach. An oasis, 
with its springs, was in sight. New courage ani- 
mates the host. Each eye flashes — each limb is 
re-strung. " God has not failed us : He has but 
tried our courage, and now He will richly supply 
our need." Loud hallelujahs would ring through 
the resonant air ; and, perhaps, a strain of their 
triumphal hymn would break forth again, and 
over the awful silence of the desert the solemn 
exulting chorus would float : — •" Sing unto the 
Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously, the horse 
and his rider He hath cast into the sea." 

And now about those three dreary days in the wil- 
derness without water : Such a host must journey 
slowly. They would easily consume three days in 
traversing a distance which a modern traveller, well 
mounted and guided, could travel in two days, or 
even, by a great effort, in one. The distance 
from Suez to Marali is not formidable, but it was 
enough to try the patience and courage of a host, 
so burdened, most severely ; and to lead them to 
look at the desert not as a home, not even as a 
land of pilgrimage, but as a grave. Mark you, it 
was a wilderness, a waste country ; no home for 
such a people, but a training-ground. Amalek 
might be content with its scanty pastures and live, 
dead to the world, dead to history, in the valleys 
of Paran. But Israel was to move on to Canaan, 



92 makah : 



to occupy the Eden of the East, to mingle in the 
congress of mankind, and to make not a history 
only, but History. And God made them see that 
it was no home for them ; their first impression of 
it never left them. " That great and terrible 
wilderness wherein was no water/' expressed 
the memory of those first days' journeys. God 
showed to them its sternest countenance, that 
they might not grow wanton and lust after its 
beauty ; and only when the desert character had 
thoroughly impressed itself on every heart, did he 
lead them into the groves of Elim, the vast 
luxuriant valleys of Paran, and unfold to them 
the riches and splendours of the land. 

And is it otherwise in life ? Is not the same 
character impressed for us on earth and life, when 
we enter on its sterner era, when we leave the 
home of our childhood, the Egypt of our careless 
half-developed youth, and go out into the wilder- 
ness, to wander freely there under the law of duty 
and before the face of God. Does it not seem to 
all of us strange and dreary ? Who ever found 
the first aspects of duty pleasant ? Is it holiday 
pastime, the first grappling with the realities of 
life ? Who has not been choked and parched by 
the hot dust of the great desert ! though it be full 
of looms, and mill-wheels, and manifold activity, 
it is a desert at first to us before we get accus- 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 93 

tomed to its atmosphere and at home in its life. 
The first march into any unexplored region of 
duty or thought, is like that three days' march into 
a weary land. Well does the schoolboy know it 
as he plods into the wilderness of study, and faints 
under the first experience of its dryness and dust. 
Let him but hold on awhile, and he will find 
springs and palm-trees, where he may rest and 
play; but it wants large faith and a goad of 
sharp necessity to get him through the weariness 
of those first days. God does not conceal from 
any one of us the hard and stern conditions of 
our discipline. The very first step out, under His 
guidance, brings us in front of the real perils and 
privations of the way. We are, none of us, coaxed 
on by soft slopes of sunny pasture, and meadows 
enamelled with flowers, till we find ourselves 
entangled in the desert and the way shut against 
our return. It is all honest and open, if stern, 
this method of Providence. Over the very thresh- 
hold of our pilgrimage is written, as on those 
glaring plains, " this is a land of wandering, not 
of rest." " Through much tribulation we must 
inherit the kingdom." " If any man will come 
after me, let him deny himself, and take up his 
cross and follow me." 

We are saved from repeating the errors and 
follies of Egypt, or are at least warned against 



94 MARAH : 



them, by the pain of our first march out into the 
free world. It bears witness to us of our present 
condition; heirs as we are of the first sentence, 
whose brand still blights the earth. That first 
sentence on God's sinful child received prompt 
execution : " So he drove out the man." That 
very night, as the shadows fell over the waste 
where no human footsteps had ever trodden, 
Adam knew that God was in earnest, and that 
he was to be a pilgrim to the end of his days. 
More dread to him than the Desert of Sin to 
Israel, was that broad Mesopotamian wilderness. 
The shadow of his guilt fell around him blacker 
than the night, and shrouded all things. The 
memory of bright Eden, lost to him for ever, 
filled him with anguish, and darkened all the 
brightness of the world. And the young heir of 
salvation, the son of the second Adam, must in 
the flesh, on earth, master the same experience, 
drink the same cup of bitterness, and be taught 
all the lessons of pilgrimage the first moment 
that he enters on his career. The echoes of the 
hymn of deliverance have hardly died down in the 
distance when some practical conflict, toil, or 
sacrifice reveals to him the essential character of 
the life which he undertakes. In the place of per- 
petual songs, some dry, dull plain of duty has to 
be trodden ; and in place of all-sustaining Divine 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 95 

strength, his first experience is of his own weak- 
ness and weariness, even in a heavenward way. 
Oh brethren ! it is in the history of all pilgrims 
of duty, that three days' thirsty march into the 
wilderness. The first stage is the true trial. It 
is along the first day's march that the bones of 
the fallen whiten the sand. 

But on the third day, as I have described to 
you, an oasis appeared in the distance, and the 
eager host struggled up to the springs to repay 
themselves for their thirsty toil. "And when they 
came to Mardh they could not drink of the waters of 
Marah, for they were bitter ; therefore the name of it 
was called Marah. And the people murmured against 
Moses, saying, What shall toe drink V 

There is nothing very striking or beautiful 
about the well of Marah — nothing to redeem its 
bitterness, of which quality the word has become 
a symbol wherever the Pentateuch is read. We 
do not find any hint of dying women and children 
pressing up to the well to drink. They were pro- 
bably by no means in utter extremities. Their 
supplies, fairly husbanded, would have spared 
them the agonies of a caravan dying of thirst. 
Still they were near enough to extremity to press 
up to the spring with eager haste, and to feel the 
full bitterness of the disappointment, when they 
found that the water was nauseous and worthless. 



96 MARAH 



It was the certainty of supply, when they saw the 
dusky verdure on the far horizon, which aggra- 
vated their sufferings, when they came up to it 
and found it naught. For three days they had 
borne up bravely — there were no wells in sight ; 
they braced themselves to endure. But when a well 
appeared they were ready for indulgence, the strain 
was taken off ; all unbraced, they gave themselves 
up to pleasure and rest. And then the disappoint- 
ment mastered them : "And the people murmured 
against Moses, saying, What shall we drink V 

It is a trite saying, that disappointment is the 
hardest of all things to bear. Hardest, because 
it finds the soul unbraced to meet it — relaxed, at 
ease, and tuned to indulgence and joy. A man 
can make up his mind to anything, and take it 
calmly. He can live under the hardest condi- 
tions, and bear them cheerily. There is nothing 
so elastic and self-accommodating in the universe 
as man. The conditions under which human 
beings have lived and flourished are most startling 
to us in these easy days. Man delights to pro- 
claim himself king of circumstance, and can main- 
tain his royalty, though in want and exile. Tell 
him what he must do and bear, and he will do and 
bear it, and much more beside. He strikes his 
average of expectation, and thinks himself happy 
with but a little beyond. " Consider that thou 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 97 

deservest to be hanged, and it will be a happiness 
only to be shot," says Carlyle, somewhere, in a 
sardonic mood. But disappointment embittei'3 
and maddens. It may be the smallest fraction of 
good, a little morsel of delight which a wealthier 
or happier would spurn ; no matter if it be but the 
killing of the prisoner's spider, or Mungo Park's bit 
of moss discovered ; whatever we are not braced 
to meet, saddens or gladdens us far beyond vastly 
larger and more momentous things which we have 
wrought up into the average of life. Who has not 
muttered "Marah" over some well in the desert 
which he strained himself to reach and found to 
be bitterness ? Have you found no salt waters 
where you thought to find sweetness and joy ? 
Love, beauty, the world's bright throngs, marriage, 
home, the things which once wooed you and pro- 
mised to slake the thirst of your soul for happi- 
ness, are they all Elims, sweet springs, and 
palms? Oh, what fierce murmurings of " Marah" 
have I heard from hearts wrung with anguish, 
from souls withered and blasted by a too fond 
confidence in anything or any being but God! 
Believe it, no man, with a man's heart in him, 
gets far on his wilderness way without some bitter 
soul-searching disappointment ; happy he who is 
brave enough to push on another stage of the 
journey, and rest in Elim, " where there are 

7 



98 MARAH : 



twelve springs, living springs, of water, and three- 
score and ten palms." 

But we must not leave Marali yet. No spring 
so bitter that God cannot heal it ; no want and 
misery so utter that a cry to Him will not bring 
effectual aid. " And Moses cried unto the Lord; 
and the Lord showed him a tree, which token he had 
cast into the loaters, the waters loere made sweet: 
there He made for them a statute and, an ordinance, 
and there He proved them, and said, if thou will 
diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, 
and wilt do that which is right in His sight, and loilt 
give ear to His commandments, and keep all His 
statutes, I loill put none of these diseases upon thee, 
which I have brought upon the Egyptians : for 
I am the Lord that healeth thee." Ex. xv. 25, 26. 

This miracle completes the lessons of Marah, 
and offers many pregnant suggestions. 

Marah was no accident. It is according to the 
law by which we all live, and under which we are 
all trained. God led them thither. He spread 
those dazzling sands for their first paths ; He 
made their first well a bitter one ; and He was 
near to watch their suffering,, to make it minister 
to their health as pilgrims, and to bring them, 
wiser and stronger, on their way. 

A question has been raised as to the precise 
nature of the miracle. Did God create the trees 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 99 

at that time for the purpose, and really give them 
as well as show them to Moses ? Or had He 
caused a tree to grow in the desert, which had 
power to sweeten the brackish waters, and thus 
help all travellers at their need ? The strict 
letter of the narrative favours the latter view; 
and travellers have sought out, in all ages, some 
desert tree, or shrub, in which this healing 
quality might be found. Many have been dis- 
covered possessing it, in some measure ; some 
the Arabs use constantly for this purpose; and 
Dr. Johnston, in his Chemistry of Common Things, 
explains at length how the bark of a certain tree 
has power to precipitate the mineral particles 
which embitter the waters, and to make them 
sweet and clear. It is a beautiful provision of 
Nature in lands where she deals hardly with her 
children. The desert is full of such compensa- 
tions. As, when one sense is lost, the loss is 
strangely supplied by the new activity of the 
rest : so when the ordinary supplies fail the pil- 
grim of the wilderness, there are ready strange, 
unknown helpers, like ministering angels, to meet 
his need.* And never, through your whole 
wandering, shall you find a well of bitterness 

* These mutual compensations of the senses are very 
singular, and are worthy of the closest study. It would 
seem as though each sense extended itself through the hody ; 

7—2 



100 MAR AH 



which God, if you cry to Him in faith and hope, 
shall not turn to sweetness ; never shall you 
miss some bright celestial messenger to show 
you a talisman which shall turn your mourning 
into dancing, your despondency into exulting 
joy. Still, Marah was no resting-place : God 
compelled it to yield them a moment's solace 
and refreshment, that they might press on to 
the bright valley which He had carpeted and 
decked for them, where they might rest awhile 
and brace themselves for more earnest toils. 

" So God shoived him a tree, which when he had 
cast into the ivaters, the ivaters ivere made siceet." 
That the tree was there in the desert at all, was 
the grand miracle. That Moses should be led 
to recognize and use its ministry, was but a 
subordinate wonder : a declaration, not a sus- 
pension, of the order of God's world. 

I make two notes on it. 

1. That in God's benignant arrangement for 
the good of His creatures, the bane and the anti- 
dote, the infection and the cure, the pain and 
the solace, lie close together. No man has to 
wander far for healing, no man has to cry out 
long for food. It is notorious that the most 

80 that the soul with all its organs is in presence in every 
part, though it has its special presence-chamber, where it 
transacts in detail the business of its life. 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 101 

common sources of pain and injury, and their 
cures, are found in close proximity. Old women's 
simples have a deeper method than science 
dreams. In the spiritual world, most surely 
the word which saves is "nigh us, even in our 
mouths, and in our hearts." If the world is 
near and the devil, Christ and all good angels 
are nearer. Cry, cry aloud ! cry promptly and 
earnestly to a present Saviour ; and, as the 
light parts and scatters the mists of the morn- 
ing, the Lord the Saviour, with all His powers, 
breaks through the gloom, and is at your side. 
This bitter well may be your first heart-searching 
hour of anguish. " The Lord hath forsaken me, 
and my God hath forgotten me," is the cry of 
your desolate heart. " This first hope has 
cheated me, all others are mockers. Go to ! 
the earth is bankrupt, and life is a snare." 
" Stand still, my brother, and see the salvation 
of God." There is a tree which God hath cast 
into the fountain of the world's bitterness ; by 
killing the sin which poisons it, He hath made 
it sweet and clear. "Look unto Jesus, the 
author and finisher of thy faith, who for the joy 
which was set before Him, endured the cross, 
despising the shame," and drink again, the water 
shall refresh thee ; then hasten on, thy home is 
in the land whose waters can never fail. " There 



102 MARAH 



is a stream there of water of life, clear as crystal, 
proceeding out of the throne of God and of the 
Lamb. And there thou shalt hunger no more, 
neither thirst any more ; the sun shall not light on 
thee nor any heat, for the Lamb which is in the 
midst of the throne shall feed thee, and shall lead 
thee unto living fountains of waters ; and God shall 
wipe away all tears from thine eyes," 

2. It strikes me that we have, in this miracle, 
most important suggestions as to the philosophy 
of all miracles. 

I believe that the object of all miracles is to 
maintain, and not to violate — to reveal, and not 
to confound — the order of God's world. All true 
miracles are revealings of the living God in 
nature ; blazing letters, to show to the blinded 
and sensual what His hand is daily doing for 
the beautifying and glorifying of the earth and 
life. The Lord has planted virtues of healing 
in drugs and balms; and the hand of Jesus, 
touching that palsied limb, reveals to us the 
fountain from which daily these blessed healings 
flow. The Lord is showing thee thus who healed 
that fever, who soothed that racking pain ; "who 
forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy 
diseases, who redeemeth thy life from destruc- 
tion, and crowneth thee with His loving-kindness 
and tender-mercies." 



THE WELL OF BITTERNESS. 103 

And what does the calming of the stormy waters 
which St. Matthew describes to us expound ? 
The Lord hath shut up the storms in the deep 
ravines that open on that blue Galilean sea, and 
the Lord's hand ever loosens their bands when 
the land is thirsty, that they may sweep cool 
showers over the panting plains. And the voice 
of Jesus, shedding sweet peace as from an angel's 
wing over the storm-vexed waters, reveals the 
Being whose word maintains, calm and constant 
through the ages, this commerce and circulation 
of the elements — this ceaseless benediction of the 
world. "This is the Lord's doing, and it is mar- 
vellous in our eijes." 

The wonders reveal the wonder, the standing 
wonder of creation. They strike again the key- 
note of its order, and tune again the concords of 
these lower spheres. But let us understand that 
God's miracles will remain but marvels, aimless 
and voiceless, such as brutes tremble at in a 
storm, until we learn that the thrilling of the 
life along the nerve tissues of the body, as it 
bathes its breast in the morning freshness or the 
balmy sweetness of the spring; the melody of 
birds, the dewy brilliance of flowers, and all the 
grace and splendour of the universe, are " shown 
unto us by the Lord." 



104 ELIM 



jlmnoit p. 

The Springs and the Palm-Trees of Elim. 

" And they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water, 
and threescore and ten palm-trees : and they encamped there by 
the waters" — Exodus, xv. 27. 

The first stage out of Egypt into the desert of 
Sinai is, as I have said, the most wearisome of the 
whole route. Three days' journey into the wil- 
derness and no water ! and their first well Marah 
— bitterness ! God help them, if this was to be 
the common texture of their experience. There 
was no lack of graves in Egypt ; all the toil and 
pain of the exodus might have been spared. And 
this history is profoundly true to life and to man's 
experience. Who has not been rudely awakened 
from his day-dreams of joyous liberty? "Who, in 
his young career, has not knelt to drink of many 
a fountain which he found to be bitterness, and 
straightway flung himself passionately on the 
sand, cursing fate, life, and even God ? 

I suppose that to all the young pilgrims of God 
the first days of joy and bliss appear like a para- 
dise regained. Sin pardoned ; the chain of the 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 105 

captor broken; the land of bondage fading in 
the distance ; the tyrants dead upon the shore. 
The glow of victory, the sense of liberty, the vision 
of glory, conspire to make the first day's journey 
a rapturous triumphal progress, a realization of 
our dream of heaven. We need the three days' 
journey, and the springs of bitterness, to disen- 
chant us ; to reveal the wilderness around and 
before us, and bring us to the condition of sober- 
minded Christian warriors, entering on a battle- 
field, the prize of which, after long stem conflict, 
will be victory in death. The humbling experience 
of our first station remains through life a whole- 
some memory : we find Marah again whenever 
we are tempted to forget the wilderness, and rest 
as though our heaven were won. It is strange, 
passing strange, to the carnal understanding, that 
the first station of God's elect host should be a 
well of bitterness ; but to those who consider it 
steadily the strangeness will become familiar, and 
they will recognize the most friendly form of the 
fatherly discipline of God. And ever, that we 
fail not utterly, close by Marah we shall find, 
when we have learnt its humbling lessons, an 
Elim with its springs and palms. 

Few stations in the desert are so difficult to 
identify as Elim, in spite of the marked features 
which it presented when Israel encamped under 



106 elim : 



its shade. There are not a few halting-places 
which might answer the description, between the 
well of Howara and the desert of Sinai ; but as 
we learn that the people subsequently encamped 
by the Ked Sea, in the Wilderness of Sin, in 
Dophkah, in Alush, before they reached Eephidim 
— (compare the narrative in Exodus with the 
table of their stations in Numbers xxxiii.) — it 
seems manifest that Elim must be in the near 
neighbourhood of Marah, and before, entering 
the mountain region, they would lose sight of the 
Eed Sea finally. Looking at the matter from 
this point of view, it seems safe to conclude that 
Elim must have been the Wady (jhurundel, of 
which the following description will convey a 
tolerably clear idea : — 

" This proved a very interesting but fatiguing day. I left 
the encampment at an early hour, and reached the edge of 
Wady Ghurundel — a considerable valley, filled with wild tama- 
risk and other bushes — in about two hours. The principal 
spring wells out at the foot of a sandstone rock, forming a 
small pool of clear water, bordered by sedges, and looked 
highly refreshing after Ayun Musa and Howara. There was 
even, delightful sight ! a little grass, and birds were hopping 
about, enjoying the rare luxury. The water, trickling off, 
pursues its way some distance down the valley, forming a reedy 
marsh, interspersed with thickets of bushes and dwarf palm-trees, 
and a considerable quantity of tamarisk, with other shrubs ; and 
as there are also considerable masses of similar vegetation above 
this point, there are, probably, several other springs which 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 107 

nourish it. Altogether it was a reviving sight in the thirsty 
desert ; and I saw no spot which could so well correspond with 
the wells and palm-trees of Elim, through the entire route to 
Wady Feiran. Filling our water-skins, we proceeded down the 
valley, encountering here and there a few straggling Arahs of 
the Terabin, with their flocks, and passing more water and 
vegetation. In rather above an hour, the blue sea peeped in 
through the western opening of the "Wady, on the left of which, 
like a portal, rises a noble mass of slaty stone, deeply hollowed 
out, and throwing a broad cool shadow into the sandy valley, 
truly ' the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.' " — Forty 
Days in the Desert, p. 33, 34. 

Such was the scene in which they rested, but 
without doubt fairer and brighter far than it 
appears to the modern traveller. They seem to 
have remained some days, at any rate, in this 
encampment and its neighbourhood, for it was 
not until " the fifteenth day of the second month 
after their departing from the land of Egypt" that 
they came into the Wilderness of Sin. And here 
I must interpose a remark, which will need to be 
borne in mind as we follow the course of the 
people on their path to Canaan. We must by no 
means suppose that when " the people" is spoken 
of, the whole mass of 2,000,000 — men, women, 
and children — is necessarily meant. Such a body 
could not travel in one band. Moses and the 
leaders with a considerable company would travel 
by one path ; great companies, pursuing the same 



108 elim : 



main track, would travel by others. Ghurundel^ 
with its springs and palm-trees, would be the 
head-quarters of Moses and the chieftains ; but 
there are springs in the valleys all round, and 
the people would doubtless distribute themselves 
under their leaders, and find water and shelter as 
they could around the central camp, which is 
recorded by name in the Sacred Text. This con- 
sideration, together with the fact that the desert 
was manifestly more fruitful in those days than at 
present, will help us to understand how so vast 
a host could find food and shelter there. You will 
not fail to note that the miraculous interpositions 
are, on the whole, but rare. Until they encamped 
in the Wilderness of Sin they seem to have found 
supply, partly from the natural productions of the 
country, and partly from the stores which they 
brought with them from Egypt. As they plunged 
into the wilder regions of the desert, the hand of 
God was disclosed to them, miraculously supplying 
their need ; and they learnt that " man doth not 
live by bread alone, but by every word that proeeedeth 
out of the mouth of God doth man live." 

Let me beg you to consider — 

I. That Elim rises before us as the representa- 
tive of the green oases, the spots of sunny verdure, 
the scenes of heavenly beauty, wherewith God 



THE SPRINGS A1STD THE PALMS. 109 

hath enriched, though sparingly, our wilderness 
world. 

"And they encamped there by the waters." How 
cool and fresh the words fall upon the ear ! So 
fell the gurgling of the springs on the ear of 
the thirsty host, as they flung themselves on the 
grass under the thick shadow of the palm-trees, 
and drank a draught which for the moment was a 
draught of bliss. The hot, blank silence of the 
desert had been around them — not a sound in 
the air, not a moving thing upon the sand. It 
is the very drearihood of silence — that desert 
stillness, the desolation of death. Suddenlv the 
freshest, brightest, most living music of nature 
gushes out into the silence, water babbles and 
glances, grass springs, tamarisks and palm-trees 
spread ; and a very paradise nestles in the bosom 
of the waste. We must tread that weary silent 
path if we would know the full breadth of the 
music of those fountains, and share the joy of 
those parched and exhausted pilgrims, who en- 
camped there by the waters, and cast them- 
selves under the shadow of the palms. And 
Elim stands not alone, the one oasis of the desert ; 
scenes yet brighter and fresher, broader tracts of 
fertility, we shall meet with as we attend their 
march. There is no desert upon earth which has 
not its Elims. Even the vast wastes of Central 



110 elim : 



Africa are known to engirdle tracts of beautiful 
and densely peopled table-land. It is the broad 
character of earth. Were it all Marah, life would 
not be tolerable, even for sinners and slaves. Its 
Elims make it a marching-ground to freemen 
and saints. Marah is the mark of the curse. 
Grod has burnt His sentence deep into the bosom 
of a sin-stricken world. But He seeks to set the 
heart of the sinner, not towards the wastes of 
desolation in despair, but towards Himself and 
His heaven in hope ; and He has brightened the 
desert of life with many a scene of beauty and 
splendour which are a prophecy of the better 
world. We cannot walk far on earth without 
stumbling upon the springs of bitterness ; but he 
who is led of God shall not want the groves and 
fountains of Elim to cheer and strengthen him in 
his way. I think it very deeply important to 
bring out the mixed character of Israel's desert 
experience, believing as I do that it furnishes the 
key to our experience of life. 

This world is not all bad ; its marches are not 
all bare. " Cursed is the ground for thy sake " 
— and because for thy sake, it is not cursed 
utterly. It is not all black, bare, lifeless, as 
the crust of a cold lava flood ; a prison-house for 
reprobates, instead of a training school for sons. 
Sin broke up its Eden for ever ; brushed the 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. Ill 

bloom from its beauty, the freshness and bright- 
ness from its smile. There is a sad tone about 
the world's countenance. On the whole, it is a 
careworn and death-stricken world ; and it looks 
like it. The shadows lie more thickly than the 
sunbeams ; the winter reigns more mightily than 
the spring. The deepest undertone of poetry and 
art is a lamentation ; earth is dressed to be the 
theatre of a tragedy of life. The optimists are 
ever mastered, in the end, by the severities of 
reality; and Epicurus, in the long-run, sets the 
fashion of suicide. It is tragic, is life ; all 
peoples have felt it ; and earth is fashioned and 
draped to be the theatre of man. I do not 
indulge here in platitudes about the falling leaves 
of autumn, and the deepening shadows of night, 
because I believe that any particular phenomenon 
of nature may be tuned by man to his mood if 
he will. But I think that I have on my side 
man's firmest convictions and earth's clearest 
expressions when I say, that in the half-lights 
of man's life here the shadow predominates, and 
that the minor -rules the music of the world. 
They were not the most foolish and shallow- 
hearted of people who believed that night was 
more potent and prolific than day. (Tacitus, 
Germania, sec. XI.) But while I see this broad 
character on life and man, and read in it the 



112 ELIM : 



fulfilment of God's sentence on His sinful child — ■ 
I say His, for He distinctly refused to cast off 
and disown him ; He rather sought, by the pro- 
mise of a Redeemer, in that very hour to link him 
at once in gratitude and hope more firmly to 
Himself. — I see further, that God has not given 
earth up, any more than man, to be the devil's 
portion ; and keeps alive, in the heart of its wil- 
dernesses, scenes of verdant freshness, of radiant 
beauty, which link it in close kindred with heaven. 
I believe of this earth of ours that there are scenes 
where heavenly visitants might fondly linger, 
which need but the transfiguring celestial sun- 
light to be beautiful and glorious as the heavenly 
land. I have seen, from mountain summits, the 
mists part for the moment, and through the rift — 
apparently in the heavens, the landscape beneath 
and around being all veiled from sight — I have 
seen the hills and meadows, the cities and rivers 
of a fair island, floating in the midst of a sea of 
intensest blue, touched here and there by silvery 
crests of foam. I have seen the vision glow in 
the lustre of such sunlight, as seemed to realize 
the images of the Apocalypse ; and then, as I 
watched it swimming in this sea of golden glory, 
the mists have gathered again on the vision, and 
left me only the memory of a glimpse of a celestial 
land. 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 113 

Such Christian saw from the summit of the 
Delectable Mountains, such Moses from Pisgah's 
crest ; such John, when he saw heaven opened in 
the Apocalypse ; such we may see, some day, when 
the mists and veils of life are parted for ever, 
and the whole breadth of the heavenly Canaan 
appears. Mere fancy! some of you say. I think 
not. Our world is as our being; and if in us 
there are here, in the midst of the dust and 
sweat of the conflict, fore-shinings, rare but clear, 
of the glories in store, let us be well assured that 
it is not otherwise with our world. But the 
outer sphere attends the inner, and is but its 
index and expositor. And inwardly to those who 
seek them, in the very stress and strain of the 
battle, there come moments when they mix with 
angels and taste the sweetness of the fellowship 
of heaven. I often think of Jacob at Mahanaim, 
where the angels of God met him ; and I am 
well assured that, were we purer and simpler- 
hearted, we might more often meet them. It is 
not that they are cold and reticent, for what is 
their joy, their work for Christ ? " are they not all 
ministering spirits sent forth to minister to them 
who shall be heirs of salvation ? ": And these 
Elims of the soul, these seasons of deep repose 
and joy, these hours of unspeakably dear and 
tender communion with the Saviour, when He brings 

8 



114 ELIM : 



us into His banqueting-house, and His banner 
over us is love, when we drink of the river of 
the water of life, and eat of the fruit of the tree 
which, self-willed, in Adam we lost, but which, 
humble and believing, in Christ we regain, are 
like these oases, of heavenly texture. They are 
sent by Christ to teach us tenderly that the 
ground is cursed, not to torment, but to task and 
train us ; and that even here we may find, if we 
will it, much both within and without us which is 
most like heaven. 

This, then, is the first teaching of Elim — its 
perennial sermon. Those fountains gurgle, those 
palm-trees wave through all the ages, to refresh 
the wilderness of the world. 

II. The nearness of Elim to Marah opens up 
to us a deep truth in the spiritual history of man. 

Had they pushed on instead of murmuring at 
Marah, they would have found all they sought, 
and more than they hoped for, at Elim. Ah ! 
the time we waste in repining and rebelling — 
scheming to mend God's counsels ! How many 
Elims would it find for us, if employed in courage 
and faith ! But that is not the main point here. 
It was quite natural that the people, after three 
days' weary march, should rest at Marah; and 
the Lord, in mercy, heard their cry, and sweet- 
ened the bitter waters, as we have seen. But the 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 115 

next stage, from Marah to Elim, was a short one 
— a brief day's march — some six miles, no more ; 
" and they encamped there by the waters." How 
near is the sweetness to the bitterness in every 
trial ! it is but a short step to Elim, where we 
may encamp and rest. The brightest spots of 
earth are amidst its most savage wildernesses, 
and the richest joys of the Christian spring ever 
out of his sharpest pains. Think you that Paul 
had not found a Marah, and an Elim not far from 
it, when he wrote this chapter of his history? " I 
knew a man in Christ about fourteen years ago, 
(whether in the body, I cannot tell ; or whether out 
of the body, I cannot tell : Grod knoweth ;) such 
an one caught up to the third heaven. And I 
knew such a man, (whether in the body or out 
of the body, I cannot tell : Grod knoweth ;) how 
that he was caught up into paradise, and heard 
unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a 
man to utter. Of such an one will I glory : yet 
of myself I will not glory, but in mine infirmities. 
For though I would desire to glory, I shall not be 
a fool ; for I will say the truth : but now I for- 
bear, lest any man should think of me above that 
which he seeth me to be, or that he heareth of 
me. And lest I should be exalted above measure 
through the abundance of the revelations, there 
was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the mes- 

8—2 



116 ELIM 



senger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be 
exalted above measure. For this thing I besought 
the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. 
And He said unto me, My grace is sufficient 
for thee : for My strength is made perfect in 
weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather 
glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ 
may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in 
infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in perse- 
cutions, in distresses for Christ's sake : for when 
I am weak, then am I strong." — 2 Cor. xii. 2 — 10. 
These abundant revelations were like a well in 
the wilderness; but how soon did he find its 
sweetness bitterness, until he was led down from 
his high places to the spring of Christ's suffi- 
ciency, and the shadow of His love ! This again 
is no accident, this nearness of Marah to Elim. 
The humbling pains of disappointment tune the 
soul for the joys which the next station of the 
journey affords. It is when we have learnt the 
lessons of the wilderness, have girt our souls to 
its toils and privations, and are resolved to press 
on, cost what it may, in our heavenly path, that 
springs of unexpected sweetness gush up at our 
very feet, and we find shade and rest, which give 
foretaste of heaven. The fresh young pilgrim, 
full of natural force and fire, content to trust 
to the common supplies of the desert, scant 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 117 

as they may be, if he may but press through 
to a home beyond, will find springs of bitter- 
ness enough. His first well will fail him ; 
his natural courage and strength will die down 
in murmurs ; and, unless he can look humbly 
to a Father's eye and hand, and cry unto Him 
who is able to deliver, he will lie down and 
die at his first station, and leave his bones to 
whiten the sand. Many such dread records has 
the desert. Pilgrims, who started high in heart 
and high in hope as you, but who never got 
beyond Marah ; they looked to an arm of flesh — 
a man's courage and endurance — and, when it 
failed them, their carcases fell in the wilderness. 
Those only who march in faith, under the hea- 
venly Leader, reach the next station, and encamp 
there by the waters of God's strong grace and 
quickening love. And through our whole career 
the same truth meets us. Emptied of self, we 
are filled with the joy of God; when we are 
weakest, then are we strongest in Christ ; dying, 
we live. " We are troubled on every side, yet not 
distressed ; perplexed, but not in despair ; perse- 
cuted, but not forsaken ; cast down, but not 
destroyed : always bearing about in the body the 
dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of 
Jesus might be made manifest in our body." 
Let a man, in the bitterness of his disappoint- 



118 ELIM : 



ment, when some spring of this world to which 
he had trusted has failed him, have faith to say — 
" send out Thy light and Thy truth : let them 
lead me ; let them bring me unto Thy holy hill, 
and to Thy tabernacles. Then will I go unto the 
altar of God, unto God, my exceeding joy : yea, 
upon the harp will I praise Thee, God my God. 
Why art thou cast down, my soul ? and why 
art thou disquieted within me ? Hope in God : 
for I shall yet praise Him, who is the health 
of my countenance, and my God" — (Psalm 
xliii. 3-5) — and you shall soon see him en- 
camping under the palm-trees, and making the 
very air resonant with the song — " Bless the Lord, 
my soul : and all that is within me, bless His 
holy name. Bless the Lord, my soul, and for- 
get not all His benefits : who forgiveth all thine 
iniquities ; who healeth all thy diseases ; who re- 
deemeth thy life from destruction ; who crowneth 
thee with loving-kindness and tender-mercies." — 
Psalm ciii. 1 — 4. 

" Let not your heart be troubled." " Verily, 
verily, I say unto you, that ye shall weep and 
lament, but the world shall rejoice : and ye shall 
be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into 
joy. A woman when she is in travail hath sor- 
row, because her hour is come : but as soon as 
she is delivered of the child, she rem ember eth no 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 119 

more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into 
the world. And ye now, therefore, have sorrow : 
but I will see you again, and your heart shall 
rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you." 
—John, xvi. 20—22. 

Marah and Elim are together everywhere. 
Life is born out of the womb of death. 

It is to me very significant, that Moses made 
the people enter into a kind of fresh covenant at 
Marah. He rebuked their murmurs, proved and 
confirmed their faith, rekindled their hope, and 
straightway they found themselves in Elim. My 
brother ! weeping by some salt fountain, groaning 
under the burdens or writhing under the stings of 
life, get thou up and renew thy covenant ; cry 
unto God thy maker, who giveth songs in the 
night : and hearken ! there is the gurgling of 
water in the distance, the song of birds, the 
breath of flowers, the shade and fruit of palms, — 
go down to Elim and rest. " The Lord is my 
shepherd ; I shall not want. He maketh me to 
lie down in green pastures : He leadeth me beside 
the still waters. He restoreth my soul : He leadeth 
me in the paths of righteousness for His name's 
sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of 
the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou 
art with me ; Thy rod and thy staff they comfort 
me. Thou preparest a table before me in the 



120 ELIM 



presence of mine enemies : Thou anointest my 
head with oil ; my cup runneth oyer. Surely 
goodness and mercy shall follow me all the clays 
of my life : and I will dwell in the house of the 
Lord for ever." — Ps. xxiii. "And when they 
came to Marah, they could not drink of the 
waters of Marah, for they were bitter : therefore 
the name of it was called Marah. And the people 
murmured against Moses, saying, What shall we 
drink ? And he cried unto the Lord ; and the 
Lord shewed him a tree, which when he had cast 
into the waters the waters were made sweet: 
there he made for them a statute and an ordi- 
nance, and there he proved them, and said, If 
thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the 
Lord thy God, and wilt do that which is right in 
His sight, and wilt give ear to His commandments, 
and keep all His statutes, I will put none of these 
diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon 
the Egyptians : for I am the Lord that healeth 
thee. And they came to Elim, where were twelve 
wells of waters, and three-score and ten palm 
trees: and they encamped there by the waters." — 
Exodus, xv. 23—27. 

III. Let us endeavour to discern the principle 
of this alternate sweetness and bitterness of 
life. 

" They came to Marah, and they could not drink 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 121 

of the waters 9 for they ivcre bitter." How is this? 
Why are the promises of nature so delusive ; why 
are the brightest things so treacherous ? does God 
make things to deceive ; does heaven stamp falsely 
the coin it issues ? are these false shows — these 
trees that fruit not, these springs that refresh not 
— God's work or the devil's ? are they the signs 
that God has left the world to the evil one, and 
these the fruits of his baneful sway ? The fairest 
spots of His earth are seamed with lava floods. 
The gardens of the world, Naples, Sicily, Lisbon, 
are arched over caldrons of seething fire. How 
shall we explain this ? " God is good and doeth 
good;" the Scripture saith it, and we gladly 
believe it ; our hearts clasp the truth, and refuse 
to let it go ; but how shall we understand this ? 
God refuses to be judged by these things : they 
are His work, and in His world ; but they are not 
final ; they exist not for themselves, nor because 
He loves them. They but attend the human as 
satellites : nature is as man is ; if you would 
understand the sweetness and bitterness of Nature, 
you must study not her, but man and God. To 
study nature otherwise, separate from man, a 
creature complete in itself, and as far as it reaches 
the complete expression of the mind of God, is to 
fall at last into hopeless confusion. These lights 
and shadows of nature, this glow and gloom, are 



122 ELIM 



caught from a higher sphere. Nature is but the 
reverse of the medal whose obverse is man. The 
ultimate reason of the bitterness of Marah, is the 
sin in the heart of Israel and all pilgrims ; the 
ultimate reason of the sweetness and freshness of 
Elim, is the mercy that is in the heart of G-od. I 
am not saying that G-od put either the well or the 
palm-trees there with a special view to that par- 
ticular journey, and the private sins of Israel's 
heart. But just as their particular sin was a stream 
from the fountain of all sin, so that particular 
Marah was a rill from the fountain of bitterness 
with which sin has poisoned the waters of the 
world. Nature has become hard, stern, and frugal 
of her stores, because we have become selfish and 
wrongful. It is we who make the bitterness ; the 
malign elements in nature are all our work. Eden 
had none of them : an evil spirit has marred the 
good constitution of the world. How manifest it 
is that an evil heart is at the bottom of all the 
bitterness and harshness of nature, let our daily 
experience teach us. There is not a day in which 
we are not fouling some bright stream of good- 
ness, or turning some sweet fountain into bitter- 
ness by sin. Our own spirits cannot alter the 
essential qualities of things, but they can alter 
their character to and effect on us. We cannot 
make gloom daylight, or harshness sweetness, but 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 123 

we can smile at the harshness, and make the 
night bright with song. 

There is a fearful power in the human spirit 
to make God's brightest blessings bitter curses. 
Who was it who wanted to die, because God had 
found a deliverance for a great city in which were 
half a million of doomed men ? And there is, too, 
a royal power in the human spirit to transmute 
curses into blessings, and to be happier by Marah 
than another shall be in Elim, who has the bitter 
waters of selfishness at his heart. There is no 
suffering so terrible that man cannot smile at it, 
no blessing so pure that man cannot make it a 
source of misery and shame. At the door of your 
own spirit lie all the pangs and wretchedness you 
have known. You have cursed fate and fortune, 
and protested that you were the most wronged 
and persecuted of men. But the mischief lies 
not in God's constitution of the world, nor in His 
government of it, but in your hearts. You have 
found, in trifles, that Marah became Elim in an 
instant, when you swept envy, malice, and 
selfishness, for the moment, clean out of your 
breast. Look into your own spirits when you 
are moaning with anguish or shrieking with 
fury, and see what hell-born passions are raging 
there; what corrosive poison of hate or lust is 
searching 'with malignant fangs for the very vitals 



124 elim: 



of your soul. You, persecuted, tormented, the 
victim of Fate ! Why you would moan and curse 
if you were standing, with all bright spirits round 
you, in the bowers of Paradise, or before the 
Eternal Throne! Sweep the heart clean of lust 
and passion ; slay not sins, but sin ; sacrifice, not 
selfishness, but self; and there is no Marah be- 
tween you and Canaan, unless you raise self from 
its tomb again, and set it up in your heart beside 
the Lord. 

It is fearful to hear men blaspheme the good- 
ness of Providence and the order of God's world, 
when their hearts are not resting on them, but 
wrestling against them with suicidal energy, inflict- 
ing, with their own hands, the wounds that drain 
the very life-blood of their souls. Many a pure 
spring you have thus filled with bitterness. Busi- 
ness, home, the marriage bond, the parental tie, 
some rich success, some new acquisition, study, or 
friend, some fresh apocalypse of the beauty and 
glory of the world, — yon have blighted and black- 
ened all of it by lust, selfishness, passion, or 
hate ; and now, by your bitter well, which your 
own lustful and envious heart has poisoned, you 
are crying out in anger and frenzy against God. 
How beautiful is earth, how blessed is life, to the 
man who rests his heart on the bosom of his 
Saviour! The bitterest water he drinks with a 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 125 

blessing, and it becomes sweeter than honey in 
his mouth. How earnestly do I wish that I could 
make you understand, that the springs of the 
sorrow of life are in you ; of the sweetness, the 
Elim, in God ! Elim, as we have seen, r was close 
to Marah. Jesus, " when he had overcome the 
sharpness of death, opened the kingdom of heaven 
to all believers." That last drop of bitterness 
He drank, and then passed up to His throne. 
Songs of celestial gladness hailed His entrance. 
" Thy throne, God, is for ever and ever; a sceptre 
of righteousness is the sceptre of Thy kingdom. 
Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity, 
and therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed 
Thee with the oil of gladness above Thy fellows.' ' 
It is true everywhere, through the whole scale of 
life. The Divine Master and Captain, the hum- 
blest pilgrim, " shall drink of the brook by the 
way, and therefore shall he lift up the head." 

The spring of our Elim is Faith. We may lie 
down beside the still waters, and bless the shep- 
herd who has led us into the green pastures; and 
straightway, growing wanton, change our Elim 
into a waste. The Elim of the soul is the presence 
of the Saviour — the word of His mouth, and the 
touch of His hand. Lose that and your springs 
sink, choked by sand ; your pastures wither and 
become burnt and bare; your sun goes down at 



126 elim : 



noon, and a thick Egyptian darkness draws its 
pall over the soul. Earth has no Elim where you 
are secure against the devil's seductions. One 
Eden he has destroyed, and its very place, 

" Like an image in a mountain lake 
Which rains disturb," 

is lost. And sin will destroy every Eden, unless 
Christ is your rock in the desert, and your cool 
shadow in a weary land. What baffled energies 
and wasted days we have spent in working out, by 
the strength of our own arm, some conquest, or 
wrestling against some great evil in the world ! At 
last, weary and desolate, we have cried out to Him 
to whom we should have sought at first, and a 
heavenly peace has spread through the stormy 
regions of passion, — a soft rest has bathed our 
strained energies, a new quick life has thrilled 
through every vein and fibre, and, " believing," we 
have entered into rest. 

I said that earth had scenes whose beauty is of 
heavenly texture — whence, as from some Pisgah 
summit, we might look into the heavenly land. I 
now say that we may make life of heavenly tex- 
ture, and live on earth as already at home with 
God, Who realizes this, is another question ; 
but there is no barrier, physical or metaphysical, 
to hinder it. Let us live in holy and loving inter- 
course with Jesus, and the fiov/ers shall spring 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 127 

out beneath our footsteps, and the music of run- 
ning waters shall attend us through the whole 
journey to the close. There are some whose clear, 
pure, childlike hearts seem to have won this privi- 
lege. Earth is to them an Elim : to their clear 
sight there is, in common things, a radiance, a 
glory, which we scarce discern in miracles. Each 
daily mercy is touched as a gift from the warm 
hand of Christ, and wakens musical thanksgiv- 
ings ; and each common trouble loses all its bit- 
terness, being sweetened inexpressibly by the 
assurance of the Saviour's love. I have known 
men — I have one now in my mind's eye — whose 
citizenship of both worlds seems already perfect ; 
who here, through purity, see a beauty and enjoy a 
bliss which we must be purged by death to make 
our own. Blessed pilgrims ! they rebuke our 
faintness and stir our courage. The end is no 
dream ; they see and touch it ; let us be strong 
and valiant, we too shall grasp it at last. "Thou 
wilt show me the path of life ; in Thy presence 
there is fulness of joy, at Thy right hand there 
are pleasures for evermore." " As for me, I shall 
behold Thy face in righteousness. I shall be 
satisfied when I awake with thy likeness." 

It may be that I am speaking to some whom God 
has led forth into bitterness as of death. It seems 
as though He had mingled His strongest cup for 



128 elim: 



you. " Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of 
Thy water-spouts ; all Thy waves and billows are 
gone over me," is the cry of your spirit. And 
now He is making a " statute and an ordinance" 
to prove you. Again and again He has led you 
out to the edge of the wilderness, and you have 
trembled and recoiled as you looked abroad over 
its free wastes. And then He has laid the yoke 
upon you more heavily. You have groaned and 
fainted under the tyrannous cruelty of sin. And 
now, in the last extremity, you go forth again, and 
you halt by the first springs : Marah ! it is all 
bitterness, everywhere ! I may as well go back 
and die ! " Turn thee, turn thee, why wilt thou 
die V To go back is to die among the flesh-pots, 
and rot there like the brutes. Turn thee ! gather 
all thy courage ; call the all-conquering Spirit of 
God to aid thee. Lift thine hand now, in a per- 
petual covenant. Give an everlasting yea to the 
vocation of God, and lo ! there wave the palms, 
there gush the fountains of Elim ; encamp there 
by the waters, and meditate on a pilgrim's life 
and " the rest that remaineth" beyond. 

Thus we may transmute through life, if we will, 
Marah into Elim by faith. Shall I be departing 
from the true monitions of my subject, if I speak 
for a moment of the bitterness of death ? You may 
conquer every trial, but the last trial still awaits 



THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 129 

you. You may sweeten every fountain of bitter- 
ness, but who shall sweeten the bitterness of 
death ? Death is the second and completer Exodus 
* — the passage of the pilgrim soul to a world of which 
the wilderness had bright foreshinings ; whose 
gates through the whole pilgrimage gleam starlike 
in the blue distance, whose brightening glories 
measure our growing nearness to our home. But 
the river of death runs cold and drear between the 
pilgrim and those homes of the blessed. We may 
take a brave heart up to its brink, but there is a 
pang of sharp anguish to be mastered as its waves 
swell up around the breast and choke us ; as with 
long gasps the spirit struggles to breathe still the 
air of a world it loves the better as it is to pass 
forth from it for ever. To die ! It is the bitter- 
ness of life ! — the last and sharpest struggle with 
the tyrannous king. Blessed be Christ, that as 
the moon which lights our pilgrimage sets in the 
wilderness, and casts a last pale gleam on the 
wastes where we have fought and suffered, the 
sunlight of the higher world flings the glow of its 
dawning splendour over an Elim, brighter, softer, 
more blessed, than even our most daring dreams. 
And there the victorious sufferers, " having con- 
quered the sharpness of death," are resting, en- 
camped by the waters ; they share the triumphs of 
courage and patience, and wait till we join them, 

9 



130 THE SPRINGS AND THE PALMS. 

to seek with us the Jerusalem of the skies. " And 
there the sun shall no more go down, nor the 
moon withdraw itself, for the Lord God shall be 
their everlasting light, and the days of their 
mourning shall be ended for ever." 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 131 



The Bread of the Wilderness. 

" He fed thee with manna {which thou knewest not, neither did 
thy fathers know ) ; that he might make thee know that man doth 
not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of the Lord doth man live." — Deut. viii. 3. 

The people broke up from their encampment by 
the waters in Elim, and resumed their wilderness 
march. The next stages of their pilgrimage 
would lead them through some of the most 
strangely magnificent mountain scenery in the 
world. They had first to traverse the successive 
wadys of the sandstone region, whose intensely 
brilliant colour surpasses anything which is to be 
met with, at any rate within the ordinary tracks 
of civilized man ; and then the wilder and grander 
granite world spread its grim peaks and passes 
before them; conducting them, by approaches 
which cast the sphynx avenues of Egypt into 
the shade, into the inner court of that sublime 
temple, where they were to hear the voice and 
behold the glory of Jehovah, and pass through 
the great crisis of their history. 

9—2 



132 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

The higher mountains of the peninsula of Sinai 
gather themselves into three chief clusters, whose 
loftiest peaks are known as Mount Serbal, Mount 
St. Catherine, and Um-Shomer — the most dis- 
tant and the loftiest, whose peak, until recently 
at any rate, no human foot has scaled. The 
broad character of this region is sterile sublimity. 
The silence, the desolation, the grand form and 
colour of the mountains, produce an impression 
on the mind of every imaginative traveller, which 
remains sacred, wholly apart from all the other 
experiences of life. 

The sublimity of the grandest Alpine peak is 
tempered by a veil of grace ; the exquisite soft- 
ness and roundness of the snow outline, the 
murmurs of cascades which fill the air with 
music, and the bright starry flowers which gem 
the earth at your very feet, lend a touch of grace 
and even gentleness to the most awful mountain 
forms. But in front of Sinai no brook, no tree, 
no flower, no bird, gives animation to the scene : 
it is blank desolation; grandeur — but as of a 
Titan petrified in death. Into this region they 
were steadily advancing. The horizon in front 
of them was already cut by lines of rich variety 
and beauty. It was an education to look upon 
them, and to learn that by that path God would 
have them pursue their way. Elim has many 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 133 

sisters, in the neighbouring valleys. There is 
some exquisite scenery in the passes between 
Elim and Kephidim, with visions here and there 
of the blue waters of the gulf, one peep of which 
Dr. Stanley thus describes : — 

" Another glorious day. We passed a third claimant to the 
title of Elim, the Wady Tayibeh, palms, and tamarisks, vene- 
rable as before ; then down one of those river-beds, between 
vast cliffs, white on the one side, and on the other, of a black 
calcined colour, between which burst upon us once more the- 
deep blue waters of the Red Sea, bright with their white foam. 
Beautiful was that brilliant contrast ; and more beautiful and 
delightful still, to go down upon the beach and see the waves 
breaking on that shell-strewn, weed-strewn shore, and pro- 
montory after promontory breaking into those waters right 
and left : most delightful of all the certainty — I believe I may 
here say the certainty (thanks to that inestimable verse in 
Numbers xxxiii.), — that here the Israelites, coming down 
through that very valley, burst upon that very view — the view 
of their old enemy and old friend, — that mysterious sea, and 
one more glimpse of Egypt, dim in the distance in the shadowy 
hills beyond it. Above the blue sea rose the white marbly 
terraces, then blackened by the passage of the vast multitude. 
High above those terraces ranged the brown cliffs of the Desert, 
streaked here and there with the purple bands which now first/ 
began to display themselves. And as the bright blue sea 
formed the base of the view, so it was lost above in a sky 
of the deepest blue I have ever observed in the East." — 
Stanley : Sinai and Palestine, p. 69. 

This was their last vision of Egypt. Their 
sea was thenceforth to be the Mediterranean, the 



134 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

highway of the Tyrian commerce, the focus of 
all the activity of the ancient world. We turn 
with them somewhat sadly from their last view of 
their old home, though it had been a bitter 
one. Memory clings even to scenes of pain and 
sorrow. It is not without sadness that we bid 
any haunt, however mournful, farewell. But 
the call, " Speak unto the children of Israel that 
they go forward," rings again through the host, 
and they pass on across the burning plain of 
Murka, and by the gorgeous valleys which lead 
into Eephidim, the entrance to the great oasis of 
Paran — now the Wady Feiran — beyond whose 
palm-groves the solemn peaks of Serbal rise. 
The sites of Dophkah and Alush (Num. xxxiii. 13) 
are quite lost, but Eephidim can be identified with 
tolerable certainty. It means " the resting-place/' 
and must have been in the near neighbourhood of 
the great resting-place of the Desert, the paradise 
of the Bedouins. The plain of Murka, the 
wilderness of Sin, was the scene of their first 
murmuring for food; but it will be more con- 
venient to trace their course to Eephidim, and 
consider together the whole question of their 
miraculous supplies, and their first battle with 
and victory over their foes. 

The oasis of Paran — the Wady Feiran — is the 
widest and the richest of those splendid luxuriant 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 135 

valleys, which here and there, at rare intervals, 
relieve the monotony of the Desert route. It lies 
at the foot of Mount Serbal, of which Dr. Stanley 
testifies, "it is one of the finest forms I have ever 
seen." The combination of the wild granite 
peaks of the mountain, its black shadows, its 
sterile silences, with the sparkling beauty of the 
broad oasis which nestled in its breast, presents 
a spectacle which I suppose can be seen only in 
those sublime deserts, through which God led His 
sons. This oasis was, in the days of Moses, the 
home of a people strong enough to dispute with 
Israel the passes of the mountains ; and, down to 
the sixth century, was the seat of a settlement 
which was a bishopric of the Christian Church. 

We identify Kephidim the more readily with 
Wady Feiran, because nature seems herself to 
have marked it out as the inevitable resting-place 
of the people on such a march. The fact that 
Dophkah and Alush were between Elim and 
Kephidim, compels us to look for the latter far on 
in the direction of Sinai. Again, it is evident 
that the people called Amalek (possibly a generic 
name for the rovers of the Desert) were established 
there. There had been no time since the exodus 
for an Idumsean people to have taken the alarm, 
and sent an expedition southwards to close the 
first passes of the Desert against the heirs of 



136 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

Palestine. This resistance was evidently offered 
by a people on the spot, righting for their altars 
and homes ; and as Paran was the only region of 
the Desert where such a people could find an 
abode, the identification of Kephidim with the 
Wady Fieran becomes almost a matter of neces- 
sity. The chief difficulty arises from the want of 
water; Feiran being abundantly supplied. But 
it is noted by travellers that the entrance of the 
valley, which drains southwards into the Eed 
Sea, is twelve miles from the springs which feed 
its verdure ; and there, doubtless, Amalek met 
Israel in arms to defend the entrance to their fair 
oasis, which Israel forced, and enjoyed during a 
long halt the beauty and fatness of the land. 
There may be seen still, in all probability, the 
very "hill" — the word in the original is specific, 
not "mountain" but "hill" — on which Moses 
wrestled in prayer for the victory of his people in 
their first battle with the foes of the Desert ; and 
there, amid the glens and peaks of Serbal, he 
meditated and matured his plans, and prepared 
himself for the next great act in the drama of his 
life — the greatest act in the drama of the world's 
life, before the advent of the Lord. 

Some slight description of the aspect which 
this oasis now presents to the traveller, will serve 
to justify the views which I have presented as to 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 137 

the rich variety, the splendid beauty, and, occa- 
sionally, the rare luxuriance of this way of the 
wilderness by which the people were led forth by 
the Lord : — 

" But a sudden change awaited us ; about noon, at a turn of 
the road, the scene that burst upon us was more like the dream 
of a poet, than any reality in this arid wilderness. The cliffs 
on either hand still towered, bare and perpendicular, to an 
immense height ; but instead of a gravelly valley, collecting 
and condensing the fiery rays of the sun, arose, as by enchant- 
ment, tufted groves of palm and fruit trees, producing on my 
mind a more vivid impression of romantic luxuriance than had 

been left by anything I had yet beheld in the East 

Here, in the heart of that terrible wilderness of rock and sand, 
of the stunted bush and nauseous scanty pool, I pitched 
my tent beneath a tall group of palms, which bent shelter- 
ingly over it ; the spring coming down the valley, and rippling 
among green sedges, formed a small transparent basin at the 
foot of a fragment of limestone rock, fallen from the mountain 
wall above ; a beautiful natural altar, as it were, decorated 
with the light pensile foliage of overhanging turfeh-trees. The 
camels, relieved of their burdens, after drinking their fill, were 
scattered about the bowery thickets, cropping the thick blossom 
with avidity and unusual relish ; whilst the Arabs spread among 
the shady trees, revelling in the choicest beauty of their Desert 
home, the proverbial "paradise of the Bedouins." The palms 
beneath which I encamped were not the solitary ornament of 
a small oasis ; but the outskirts of a dense grove, extending 
for miles far up the narrow valley. On stepping out of my 
tent, I was at once in the midst of an almost tropical wilder- 
ness. In the palm-groves of Egypt the stems are trimmed 
and straight, and placed generally at regular intervals ; but 



138 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

here this most graceful of trees is half untended, its houghs 
spring direct from the earth, and form tufts and avenues, and 
dense overarching thickets of the most luxuriant growth, 
through which the sunlight falls tremblingly upon the shaded 
turf. Among them some few, shooting upright, lift high above 
the rest their lovely coronal of rustling fans and glowing 
bunches of dates ; but the greater part assume that fantastic 
variety of form which only untended nature can originate ; 
some, wildly throwing forth their branches, droop to the 
ground like heavy plumes, laden with a graceful burden of 
fan-like boughs which almost kiss the turf; others, crossing 
and intertwined, form mazy alleys of exquisite verdure ; the 
clear stream bubbles freshly on the edge of these arcades, and 
the deep solitude is vocal with the song of birds ; the wind, 
sweeping down the rocks, plays over the rustling foliage with 
the gentlest murmur ; and, shut in by two lofty walls of rock 
from the dreary Desert without, the traveller, lulled in a 
dreamy and delicious repose, heightened by his past weari- 
ness, forgets awhile its perils and privations, and the long 
distance he has yet to accomplish across its drouthy sands." — 
Forty Days in the Desert, pp. 51, 52. 

Having thus sketched the scene, and traced 
the history, let us study its moral meanings, and 
draw forth some portion of the rich instruction 
which it affords. 

I. They broke up from their encampment in 
Elim in an enervated and murmuring mood. 

" And they took their journey from Elim, and all 
the congregation of the children of Israel came into 
the wilderness of Sin, which is "between Elim and 
Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 139 

their departure out of the land of Egypt. And the 
ivhole congregation of the children of Israel mur- 
mured against Moses and Aaron in the ivildemess : 
and the children of Israel said unto them, Would to 
God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land 
of Egijpt, when we sat by the flesh-pots, and when ive 
did eat bread to the full ; for ye have brought us forth 
into this wilderness, to hill this ivhole assembly with 
hunger." — Exod. xvi. 1-3. 

They had eaten of the fat of the wilderness and 
become wanton, and they began to lust even for 
the fat of Egypt, the slave's portion ; the lot of 
the freeman already seemed too spare and hard. — 
Wisely, indeed, was the wilderness appointed for 
our wanderings. Wisely was Adam sent forth 
into the land in which "in the sweat of his brow he 
must cat bread" Bread won more cheaply may 
fatten the body, but it sends " leanness into the 
soul." I never heard that money won by gam- 
bling or thieving brought a blessing with it to 
its possessor. Did you ever hear of speculation 
enriching either mind or heart ? At the time of 
the great railway mania, any lad who could squint 
along a level could earn large sums by surveying, 
while the fever lasted, especially in the early days 
of November. One, who knew the whole thing 
thoroughly, told me that he had never met one of 
them who had been blessed by his gains. Money 



140 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

which comes cheaply goes cheaply, and leaves no 
benediction. God's inscription on His coin is 
labour. It is of another mintage, when that im- 
pression cannot be traced. Men dream away life 
at Naples, Palermo, or Constantinople. It is the 
men who have to battle with the Northern seas, 
and wring a harvest from the Northern climate, 
who support the great characters in the drama of 
history. 

God does not multiply our Elims, for He can- 
not trust us there. He gems the earth with them, 
to teach us that it is not all blasted, that we are 
not a cursed race in a cursed world. He sets 
them before our eyes as witnesses that there are 
worlds where there is no bitterness in the foun- 
tains, and where man shall find more than a 
Paradise regained. But He suffers us not to 
linger there ; and when He leads us forth, He 
knows that we shall be but murmuring pilgrims, 
till privation and toil have braced our moral 
muscles again, and restored the poise of the 
pilgrim soul. How many of us have come out 
of our Elim strengthened ? From out some cold 
salt-bath of calamity we have come forth again 
and again renewed. But Elim ! who can bear its 
sweetness and softness ! who does not grow wanton 
by its gurgling waters and rustling palms ? 

They are the very finest and purest natures 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 141 

which are tuned to a higher key in Elim ; most 
of us get let down to the level of the key-note of 
this wanton world. To enjoy the season of rest 
and refreshment with a high-souled resolution to 
hold on the way, as soon as the rest has renewed 
us, how hard ! how rare ! God's richest mercies 
we steep in bitterness ; His most beautiful gifts 
and seasons we abuse to His loss. Bare are these 
palm-groves on earth. The marvel is, that they 
are not rarer ; but that God's wisdom is merciful, 
it would be an utter waste. But it is a bitter 
thing that rest and plenty make men wanton, 
and that our Father is driven to the severer 
methods in dealing with our sensual souls. Rest 
in Elim, but dare not to ungird. Drink ; but like 
Gideon's men, " lap " as in haste. Sleeping, 
let your loins be girt, your lamps burning, your 
staves ready to your hand — prompt at the first 
signal to renew the wilderness way. Grow wanton 
there, and you make, as I have said more at 
large, the whole world a wilderness ; and your 
next station will find you crying for the flesh-pots 
of Egypt — the fodder of slaves. 

II. The first stage of their journey brought 
them out into a vast sandy plain, where there 
was real danger, to the eye of sense, of their dying 
of hunger. 

Elim had re-heartened them after Marah. But 



142 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 



the wilderness of Sin renewed their pains and 
terrors, and " the whole congregation of the 
children of Israel murmured against Moses and 
Aaron." 

Their cry after the flesh-pots was the fruit of 
Elini. They had renewed there the blunted edge 
of their lust. The old appetites resumed their 
sway, as they sat by the waters and ate of their 
flocks ; when they went forth their murmurs broke 
out with new fierceness, as of lust rekindled, and 
in spirit, at any rate, they gave themselves again 
to be slaves. Beware of rekindling the flame of 
a dying lust or appetite. Starve it — it is the only 
policy. Let it taste again, let it but look again, 
it flushes up into full fever glow, and you are 
once more enslaved. The thirst for blood may 
lie latent in a tiger while hlood is denied; let 
him but lap a drop of it, and the passion is all 
aflame. 

Still the danger, to the eye of sense, was a real 
one. Their flocks and herds had been nourished 
in the pastures of Elim, and had revived after 
their three days' burning march ; but what hope 
was there of saving them in the end ? A new 
course was before them; still no pasture, no 
water ! and when the flocks and herds were dead 
what should nourish them in the waste ? The 
danger to men who had no vision of the Invisible, 



THE BEEAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 143 

was pressing and real. Their dread of it was faith- 
less and shameful. God was the God of the 
waste and of the flesh-pots; the plenty of Egypt 
and the dearth of the Desert were alike from His 
hand. He had broken for them every morsel 
they had eaten in Egypt ; His hand, curbing the 
stormy waters from their path, had led them 
forth into the wilderness; and what were its 
wastes that they should frustrate His purposes, 
or refuse to nourish His beloved ? 

Then follows the history of two of the most 
stupendous miracles recorded in the Word of 
God. 

" Then said the Lord unto Moses, Behold, I will 
rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall 
go out and gather by a certain rate every day, that I 
may prove them, whether they will walk in my laiv, 
or no. And it shall come to pass, that on the sixth 
day they shall prepare that ivhich they bring in ; and 
it shall be twice as much as they gather daily. ," 
" And when the deiv that lay was gone up, behold, 
upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small 
round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. 
And when the children of Israel saiv it, they said one 
to another, It is manna : for they wist not what it 
was. And Moses\said unto them, This is the bread 
which the Lord hath given you to eat. This is the 
thing ivhich the Lord hath commanded, Gather of it 



144 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

every man according to his eating, an omer for every 
man, according to the number of your persons ; take 
ye every man for them which are in his tents. And 
the children of Israel did so, and gathered, some more, 
some less." . . . "And the people thirsted there 
for water ; and the people murmured against Moses, 
and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us 
up out of Egypt, to hill us and our children and our 
cattle with thirst 1 And Moses cried unto the Lord, 
saying, What shall I do unto this people 1 they be 
almost ready to stone me. And the Lord said unto 
Moses, Go on before the people, and take with thee of the 
elders of Israel ; and thy rod, wherewith thou smotest 
the river, take in. thine hand, and go. Behold, I ivill 
stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb ; and 
thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water 
out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did 
so in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called 
the name of the place Massah, and Meribah, because 
of the chiding of the children of Israel, and because 
they tempted the Lord, saying, Is the Lord among us 
or not V Exod. xvi. 4, 5, 14-17 ; xvii. 3-7. 

Such is the startling statement of God's book ; 
such the strong belief of the Jewish people 
through all their generations, confirmed by the 
words of the Lord Jesus. And I firmly believe 
it simply as it is here set down. God was 
beginning the education of an infant race ; He 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 145 

was teaching again the lessons which in the dark- 
ness consequent on the Fall had been forgotten or 
obscured. And this was among the first : " Man 

SHALL NOT LIVE BY BKEAD ALONE, BUT BY EVERY 
WORD THAT COMETH OUT OF THE MOUTH OF Gk)D." 

The reality of this miracle has been attacked 
in all ages. Travellers have brought back won- 
derful accounts of the honey dew which falls in 
the Desert, and nourishes the exhausted traveller; 
also of the tree manna, which exudes in large 
quantities from the tamarisk-tree, and covers the 
whole ground ; both which answer, in some very 
qualified degree, to the description in the text. 
There seems to be no doubt about the natural 
productions of the Desert, though it is difficult 
to get at the whole truth about them. It seems 
to me that the Arabs are clever cicerone, and 
tell the traveller what it pleases him most to 
hear. The Eationalists come back with explicit 
Arab testimony in one direction, and the Orthodox 
with as clear statements in the opposite one. 
Doubtless they are prompt to answer leading 
questions, and lie liberally, we fear, when well 
paid. But we may freely accept the account of 
travellers on the subject of the natural manna. 
I should be as little inclined to doubt that many 
natural rills are found springing out of the rocks 
of the Desert. God does not contradict Himself, 

10 



146 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

or dishonour nature, by his miracles. I should 
anticipate that this miracle, like all miracles, 
would be a revelation ; an unfolding of the inner 
springs of the mechanism of nature there ; an 
exaltation and perfecting of some handiwork of 
nature for His people's good. It seems most likely 
to me that there should be some natural substance 
there, to be the bread of the desert to the few 
wanderers ; and that God, as with the loaves and 
fishes, and the wine at Cana, multiplied and 
purified it exceedingly, and made it a perennial 
store for the supply of His children's need. The 
gift of the manna was unquestionably a miracle ; 
the quality, the constancy, the Sabbath supply, 
and its cessation, as reported in Joshua v. 12, all 
mark it out as a miraculous supply of what was 
truly a marvellous need — for the miracle of 
miracles was the presence of that people there — 
and it does not trouble me, it rather instructs me 
and deepens my sense of the wonder of the 
works of God, when I hear that manna is still in 
small quantities to be found in the Desert, and 
that streams start freshly out of rocks in a very 
remarkable and unexpected way. God's care of 
His people is not a constant suspension of the 
laws which govern and bless His creatures, but a 
more full and rich application of them, that they 
may bestow the whole blessing which their hands 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 147 

contain. The order of things is good; God's 
miracles even cannot mend it ; they but disclose 
it, and apply its blessing directly to the child 
whom He instructs and tends.* 

Israel had to learn that it was quite as wonder- 
ful that they should have been fed in Egypt, as 
that they should eat bread in the Desert ; that 
the one as well as the other was the distinct and 
wonderful handiwork of God. Many streams 
they had passed gushing out of the rocks as they 
had journeyed, and had drunk, unmindful of the 
hand which held the cup to their lips. It needed 
that they should be perishing, and be visibly sup- 
plied by the hand of God, before they understood 
the great wonder, their daily sustenance, and 
learnt that daily "by the word that cometh out 
of the mouth of God doth man live." That 
bread and that water were in a sense living — fresh 
angels' food. They must have had a special 
sweetness in them, compared with the waters of 
the cisterns which we hew — puddles fouled and 
muddied by the hoofs of our vagrant desires and 
lusts. But this bread even, the angels' food, 

* See, on the whole subject of the miraculous, the masterly 
Discourse on Revelation, published many years ago by 
A. J. Scott, A.M. ; which seems to me to be the quarry from 
which many views on miracles, now fully current, have been 
hewn. 

10—2 



148 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

nourishes not a spirit : " The Father giveth ns 
the true bread from heaven." " The bread of 
God is He which cometh down from heaven and 
giveth life unto the world." 

And think you, brother pilgrim ! that in any 
waste to which you are led forth by God's angel, 
His bread and water can fail you ? Think you 
that if you go up out of Egypt, shake off the 
fetters of any bondage that weakens and de- 
grades you, He will leave you to starve in the 
desert ? Man of business ! struggling to live 
honestly and bravely, flinging off the bonds of 
the habits which reign in the Goshen of commer- 
cial wealth and splendour, think you that your 
bread and water are other than sure ? Let this 
history of Israel teach you : it was written for 
your learning. Go forth, and the dews shall feed 
you, the rock shall give you drink ; but not one 
hair of your head or of those who depend on you, 
be you but brave and faithful, shall be harmed. 

Oh ! how fearful are we when we get out of 
our Egypt into new scenes, where the familiar 
supplies and associations fail. So long as we had 
it in our own hand, our own garden, our own 
cooking-pot, none so confident as we ! But 
abroad in the desert, among rocks and sands ! 
Can waters spring from the flinty rock, and bread 
grow out of the dry ground ? Yea, all this is 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 149 

possible — easy to Him as your leek and melon 
beds in Egypt ; but one thing is impossible, im- 
possible for ever, for the supplies of God to fail a 
trusting believing soul. Men lay up for their 
children " where moth and rust corrupt, and 
thieves break through to steal," and think they 
have done well, and made all sure ; while the 
riches of faculty and character, which can never 
perish, and the blessing of God, which can never 
grow old, seems to us but an uncertain heritage 
for our beloved. And so we, blind as we are to 
the real presence of God everywhen and every- 
where, have to be brought low, and made to cry 
out of misery ; and then He shows to us, in our 
want and sorrow, what He had shown to us in 
our joy and plenty, but we would not see it, that 
every thing is by " the word that cometh out of 
the mouth of God." 

Neither did they learn the lesson from these 
miracles perfectly. They had to be brought down 
again, and again, and again, and the lesson had 
to be reiterated, with indignant judgments, Be- 
ware ! "how is it that ye do not understand 1 " Deep 
teaching of spiritual truth is there in these 
miracles, wonderful unfoldings of the mysteries of 
man's spiritual life. The outer life is the key to 
the inner ; as the body lives by bread, so the soul 
must live by Christ or perish. As they ate of 



150 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

that manna and drank of that brook, they were 
called to commune in love and confidence with 
their God, and be nourished unto life. 

Alas ! how few won the double blessing. They 
drank of that well and thirsted again, they ate of 
that bread and died. The world's food cannot 
nourish spirits, the world's pleasures cannot 
satisfy the infinite longings of a human heart. 
" Take thy fill, eat the fat and drink the sweet ;" 
and then, if that be all, the fever of insatiate long- 
ing, the fire of ravening lust, through eternity. 
How calm and deep, amid the stirrings and 
rushings of the thirsty host to fill their water- 
cups at the rill which was flashing and gurgling 
through the sand — meet type of the wrestling, 
panting multitude who are thronging all the plea- 
sure springs of the world — do the words of Jesus 
fall upon the ear : " Whosoever drinheth of this 
water shall thirst again ; bat ivhosoever drinketh of 
the ivater that I shall give him sliall never thirst, but 
the ivater that I shall give him shall be in him a well 
of ivater, springing up into everlasting life," 

III. Kephidim was the scene of their first 
battle and their first victor}^. 

In the first great act of the drama of deliver- 
ance, their duty had been simply to " Stand still 
and see the salvation of God." The hour was 
now come when they must " quit them like men 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 151 

and fight." Not otherwise is it in the Christian 
life. To rest on Christ, to " stand still and see 
His salvation," is the true deliverance of a spirit: 
this is redemption. But we must fight hard, as 
if the victory depended on ourselves — not for 
redemption, but as redeemed, if we would reap 
all its glorious fruits. 

The first foes of Israel were their kinsmen. 
"And a man's foes shall be they of his own 
house." Notably so in the first ages, and in 
heathen lands ; but even here, how hard it is to 
take up an independent standing-ground among 
one's kinsmen and familiars, and to be a saint 
among one's friends ! But come whence they 
may, foes soon beset the young pilgrim : before 
he has gone far, a long day's battle will test his 
courage and strain his strength. Lusts and pas- 
sions, which he thought he had slain for ever, 
stand forth alive, and renew the conflict. The 
Egyptians slain, new enemies throng round us. 
Our pilgrimage must be a war-march, with battle- 
music and banners: "Jehovah nissi," "the 
Lord my banner," we cry, and renew the fight. 
How prone is the young soldier of Christ to think 
that his first victory is a final one ! But the out- 
ward tyranny beaten, the external enemy slain, 
he finds, as Israel found, that the true battle of 
life commences ; that things and beings clear to 



152 THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 

him as his own soul range themselves to oppose 
his progress, or lurk as traitors within the citadel 
of his own heart, ready to render it meanly to the 
foe. "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off 
and cast it from thee," is the charge which is laid 
upon him. " Thou therefore endure hardness, 
as a good soldier of Jesus Christ," is the inspiring 
cry of his Chief. But the battle goes hard, the 
foemen are many and strong, the heart faints, 
the strength fails, the banner droops, and Amalek 
raises the shout of victory. "Who is sufficient 
for these things?" Who can bear the strain 
and stress of this war ? Lift up your eyes and 
behold the great Intercessor ! Behold the up- 
lifted arms of Jesus, pleading your cause before 
the Eternal Throne. Pray! wrestle in prayer! 
fight with heart uplifted ! The hand brave, 
strong, prompt as Joshua's; the heart humble, 
dependent, prayerful, as Moses', and hell has not 
strength to master you : 

" By all hell's hosts withstood, 
We all hell's hosts o'erthrow, 
And conquering them by Jesus' blood, 
We still to conquest go." 

Let your heart lose its hold on Jesus, your ban- 
ner sinks, the enemy closes round it, the battle is 
lost ! Nay, look once more. Grasp once more 
the consecrated standard, cross-bearing, renew the 



THE BREAD OF THE WILDERNESS. 153 

fight ; and that banner shall float victorious on 
all the storms that rage through the field of 
conflict ; your steps shall be heard at length at 
heaven's gate as the steps of a conqueror, and 
shouts of triumph shall ring through the arches 
of the heavenly temple, as you bend before the 
Captain of salvation to receive your crown. 



154 THE KEVELATION 



^tpon mi 

Sinai. The Revelation of the Divine 
Name. 

" I am the Lord thy God." — Exod. xx. 2. 

If we are right in the identification of Eepliidim 
with the Wady Feiran, the great Oasis of the 
Desert, we shall have the less difficulty in deter- 
mining the site of the Mountain of the Law. 
This giving of the law to the Jewish people, is the 
most solemn and pregnant event before the Chris- 
tian era ; it has but one parallel — the advent of 
Him who giveth the lav/ to the whole human 
world. The sentence is profoundly true, that 
that clay was the birthday of history. The whole 
significance of the exodus was developed before 
Sinai ; and History, as well as Israel, was baptized 
there in the name of the Lord God " of all the 
earth." In the heart of that terrible and magni- 
ficent wilderness, He wrote His name above the 
tabernacle of man's history. Like the name of 
the architect of the Pharos, it has been overlaid 
by that of the kings, conquerors, and divine heroes 
of this world; but the clay crumbles away through 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 155 

the wear of the ages, and the name of the Lord 
God of Israel stands out grandly before us as at 
first. 

The general term, Sinai, is applied to the 
centre group of the great mountain system of red 
and grey granite, which occupies the southern 
portion of the angle enclosed by the two arms of 
the Eed Sea. The western group is known by 
the name of Serbal, the eastern is Um-Shomer, 
the highest peak of the region ; and the central 
group, loftier than Serbal, lower than Um-Shomer, 
is Sinai. It consists of a cluster of summits, of 
which the highest, Djebel Katherin, commands a* 
most magnificent panoramic view of the whole 
peninsula, and the two Gulfs, Suez and Akaba, 
intensely blue. The second and lower peak, 
Djebel Mousa, is the traditional scene of the 
giving of the law. Towards the north those two 
ridges blend in an elevated rocky plateau, which 
stretches some miles in a northerly direction, and 
flinging up some of the wildest and sharpest peaks 
in those regions (Bas Saseafeh) , descend sud- 
denly in a sheer precipice on a perfectly level plain, 
enclosed by mountains on every hand, except to 
the east ; there it bends round the spurs of the 
mountains, and joins the Wady-es-Sheykh, the 
great highway of that part of the Desert. Every 
traveller describes this scene as peculiarly grand, 



156 THE REVELATION 



and even sublime. The plain, the Wady-er- 
Kaheh, is about a mile and a half in length, 
perfectly level, surrounded by steep cliffs on every 
hand; and in front of the traveller, as he descends 
the rough mountain pass, Nakb Howy, which is 
the nearest though most difficult route from the 
Wady Feiran to the Convent of Sinai, there is 
this range of magnificent precipices, Has Saseafeh, 
descending sheer into the level of the plain, and 
forming one of the most impressive panoramas 
which can be contemplated by the eye of man. 
As the traveller looks down on this level plain 
•from the wild pass, Nakb Howy (the Pass of the 
Wind) , it seems to be locked on every side by 
mountains ; only on advancing it is seen to bend 
to the left round a bold promontory of rock, and 
to mingle with the great highway of the Desert ; 
which, avoiding the Nakb Howy, sweeps round 
the outside of the mountain chain, from the en- 
trance of the Wady Feiran to Sinai and Akaba. 

The desolation in this land-locked sea of sand 
is utter; the silence profound. It is the inner 
sanctuary of Nature's great mountain temple. 
" If I were to make a model of the end of the 
world," writes one, "I would make it from the 
Convent of Mount Sinai." The forms of the 
granite cliffs which enclose the plain are singu- 
larly bold and strong. They have, at the same 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 157 

time, a certain grand uniformity, like the avenue 
— the dromos — of sublime sculptured forms which 
led on to the shrine of the Egyptian temples. 
God carved and piled the approaches to this great 
mountain sanctuary, where His sublimity was to 
be revealed. 

I dwell on these particular features because 
I believe in their significance. I believe that 
God has established a special relation between 
races of men and the forms of nature in the 
country they inhabit ; and that, further, there 
is both mental and moral discipline to an 
awakened, attentive spirit in the haunts of 
nature which it frequents, and in the midst of 
which the inner life brings forth its fruits. The 
jaded head and heart, in our day, fly for solace 
and refreshment to the glorious mountain regions, 
where, amid the solemnities of glaciers and snow 
peaks, our fretful spirits may gather strength and 
calm. The valley of Chamounix, the Grindel- 
wald, the Bay of Naples, the orange groves of 
Sorrento, have been temples of worship and reve- 
lation to many an over- weary heart and spirit. 
God is not more there than here, but our spirits 
catch there more quickly the key-note of com- 
munion ; they put off their veils, and pass more 
simply, more wholly, from before the face of 
nature to the face of God. Mere fancy ! one tells 



158 THE REVELATION 

me, to whom Fleet Street is the oasis of the 
desert of life. To you, doubtless, it is mere 
fancy. But tell me, why did God lead forth 
this people into the heart of sublime mountain 
scenery, through its most difficult passes, to the 
very core of its grandest expression, when He 
would reveal to them His law and Himself ? It 
was not the nearest way, it was not the easiest 
way, it was not the pleasantest way ; but it was 
the right way, because beauty, splendour, sub- 
limity, were there. The people, probably, would 
not journey by the narrow and difficult "Pass 
of the Wind," which I have described as leading 
from the Wady Feiran to the head of this small 
plain Er Kaheh. The host, with the impedi- 
menta, would follow the vast crescent-shaped 
Wady-Es-Sheykh 3 which bends round the out- 
side of the mountains, and join Moses and the 
leaders in this narrow plain, on which they would 
look down from the summit of the pass, and see 
the level sand stretching like a sea up to the very 
foot of the Mount of God. They looked upon 
a scene which was destined to be ever memo- 
rable in the history of earth and eternity. Let 
me present to you the description, of a recent 
and most observant traveller : — 

" We started at five, a.m. The camels went round by 
Wady Es-Sheyldi ; we took the direct route by Wady Solab, 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 159 

which, passing by several deserted Bedouin villages of the 
Arab serfs of the convent, with their lonely burial-grounds, 
brought us to the foot of the Nakb Howy, the ' Pass of the 
Wind,' a stair of rock, like that by which we had mounted to 
the cluster of Serbal, and by which we were to mount again 
into the second and highest stage of the great mountain laby- 
rinth. . . . We reached the head of the pass ; and, far in 
the bosom of the mountains before us, I saw the well-known 
shapes of the cliffs which form the front of Sinai. At each 
successive advance these cliffs disengaged themselves from the 
intervening and surrounding hills, and at last they stood out — 
alone against the sky. On each side the infinite complications 
of twisted and jagged mountains fell away from it. On each 
side the sky encompassed it round, as though it were alone 
in the wilderness. And to this giant mass we approached 
through a wide valley, a long continued plain, which, enclosed 
as it was between two precipitous mountain ranges of black 
and yellow granite, and having always at its end this pro- 
digious mountain block, I could compare to nothing else than 
the immense avenue—' the dromos,' as it is technically called 
— through which the approach was made to the great Egyptian 
temples. One extraordinary sensation was the foreknowledge 
at each successive opening of the view of every object that 
would next appear ; as cliff and plain, and the deep gorges on 
each side, and, lastly, the convent with its gardens burst 
before me ; it was the unfolding of the sight of sights, of 
which I had heard and read for years, till each part of it 
seemed as familiar as if I had seen it again and again. Was 
it the same or not ? The colours, and the scale of the scene, 
were not precisely what I should have gathered from descrip- 
tions ; the colours less remarkable, the scale less grand. But 
the whole impression of that long approach was even more 
wonderful than I had expected. Whatever may have been the 
scene of the events in Exodus, I cannot imagine that any 



160 THE REVELATION 

human being could pass up that plain and not feel that he was 
entering a place above all others suited for the most august of 
the sights of earth. We encamped outside the convent, at the 
point where the great Wady Es-Sheykh falls into the Wady 
Er-Raheh, immediately under the corner of the cliff." — Sinai 
and Palestine, pp. 73, 74. 

Here, then, in this plain, and not in any of 
the narrow gullies and broken ravines of the 
mountain, doubtless the Israelites encamped; 
and the pile of jagged cliffs rising sheer out of 
the plain, and not the more distant summits, 
would be the scene of the giving of the Law. In 
this site alone are to be found fulfilled all the 
conditions which the narrative requires : — " A 
mount which might be touched," — which seems 
to exclude the distant summits; a plain at the 
foot of the mount, whence a complete view might 
be gained by a great host ; a situation in which 
Moses might be able to hear the sound of song 
in the camp, but not be able to see, as in some 
of the lateral ravines by which he would have 
to descend the precipitous cliff; room for the 
idolatrous festival, and a brook coming down 
from the mount, where the ashes might be 
scattered, and the people compelled to drink. 
There, too, bounds could easily be set about 
the mount, lest the people should break through ; 
and, in a word, all the important conditions are 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 161 

fulfilled. Dr. Robinson and Dr. Stanley join in 
affirming that the general aspect of this site is 
a most convincing argument ; and that nothing 
but the most conclusive evidence could induce 
any one, who has carefully surveyed the localities, 
to give up the belief that the Wady-er-Raheh 
and the cliffs of Sasafeh which overhang it, were 
the scene of the giving of the law. The view 
of the plain from the summit completes this 
impression. 

" The first thing to be done was, therefore, to gain the 
summit of the other end of the range called the Has Sasafeh 
(Willow Head), overlooking the Er-Raheh from above. The 
whole party descended, and after winding through the various 
basins and cliffs which make up the range, we reached the 
rocky point overlooking the approach we had come the pre- 
ceding day. The effect on us, as on every one who has seen 
and described it, was instantaneous. It was like the seat on 
the top of Serbal, but with the difference, that here was the 
deep, wide, yellow plain sweeping down to the very base of the 
cliffs ; exactly answering to the plain on which the people 
1 removed and stood afar off.' . . . There is yet a 
higher mass of granite immediately above this point, which 
should be ascended, for the greater completeness of view 
which it affords. The plain below is then seen extending not 
only between the ranges of Tlaha and Furei'a, but also into 
the lateral valleys, which, on the north-east, unite it with the 
wide Wady of the Sheykh. This is important, as showing how 
far the encampment may have been spread below, still within 
sight of the same summit. Behind extends the granite mass 
of the range of Gebel Mousa, cloven into deep gullies and 

11 



162 THE REVELATION 

basins, and ending in the traditional peak, crowned by the 
memorials of its double sanctity." — Sinai and Palestine, 
pp. 75, 76. 

Now let us try to analyze and realize the moral 
meaning of the scene. 

The first grand, all- comprehensive fact which 
we meet with is, that they were led np into the 
wilderness that they might enter into covenant 
with God. 

" And Moses went up unto God, and the Lord 
called unto him out of the mountain, saying, Thus 
shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the 
children of Israel; Ye have seen what I did unto 
the Egyptians, and hoiv I bare you on eagles' wings, 
and brought you unto myself. Noiv therefore, if ye 
will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, 
then ye shall be a 'peculiar treasure unto me above all 
people : for all the earth is mine : and ye shall be 
unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. 
These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the 
children of Israel. And Moses came and called for 
the elders of the people, and laid before their faces 
all these ivords which the Lord commanded him. 
And all the people answered together, and said, All 
that the Lord hath spoken ive will do. And Moses 
returned the ivords of the people unto the Lord." — 
Exod. xix. 3-8. 

This is the prologue of the scene which follows, 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 



which gives to it all its significance ; a people 
entering into covenant with the "High and holy 
One who inhabits eternity;" "Who doeth 
according to His own will among the armies 
of heaven, whose hand none of the inhabitants 
of the earth can stay, or say unto Him what 
doest Thou?" "Who is above all things, and 
was before all things," "for whose pleasure all 
things are and were created." 

I. God in covenant with man, is the condi- 
tion of the existence and development of man's 
spiritual life. 

Man is either a sinner under sentence, which it 
may please the Judge at any moment to execute ; 
or he is a sinner spared on the distinct under- 
standing that God is seeking his life and not his 
death. In the first case, no spiritual life is pos- 
sible ; if death, the death of the soul as the 
penalty of sin, is certain sooner or later, then 
morals have no meaning for man. The sooner it 
is over the better : " Let us eat and drink, for 
to-morrow we die." But this is not the condition 
in which a merciful God has left us. Adam did 
not so understand it when he went out from 
Eden. The occurrences of his life, and the par- 
ticulars of his intercourse with God, are hidden 
from us ; but thus much we gather from what is 
recorded of his history, that Adam cherished till 

11—2 



164 THE REVELATION 

death a pious and thankful confidence in God, 
built on the first promise ; which confidence 
implies, of necessity, that he felt that his sin 
might be forgiven, that his wounds might bo 
healed. However dark the wilderness might be 
compared with Eden, its twilight was the dawning 
which would not darken into night, but flash up 
into rosy day. Noah did not understand it so. 
He cherished the hope of his sire, that the cursed 
earth and the afflicted soul might look up with 
hope to God. Abraham did not understand it so. 
No malefactor, respited for a moment but surely 
doomed, did he walk with God in Palestine, but 
a man in covenant with his Maker — a man whom 
God had called His friend. 

Noyvt this sense, that man is not only reprieved 
for a time, but is a being concerning whom God 
has an object and a hope, a being with life before 
him and not death, unless he wills to die, under- 
lies all human moral activity and progress. And 
this is, in other terms, a covenant of God. It 
may not be expressed in what remains of the 
history of Adam ; it is expressed in the history of 
Noah and Abraham, and we are made to see that 
this was the rock on which they edified their lives ; 
and it is every man's rock who would have a 
foundation stronger than the quicksands of fancy 
and listless expectation ; who is not content just 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 165 

to take his chance with the creature which perishes 
and shall perish, but seeks to connect his life with 
God, who endures and shall endure. In some 
shape or other, some covenant of God must 
underlie the life and progress of the world. 

You may say the sentences, which are here set 
down as the words of God's own lips, cannot be 
the words of Him whom "the heaven, even the 
heaven of heavens, cannot contain" — so serene, so 
lofty, so infinitely removed from our comprehen- 
sion and thought. The idea of God speaking 
to men, making a covenant with men, enacting a 
code of express regulations, descending even to 
the minutest details of life, must be a dream of 
man's, not a thought of the mind of God. You 
may say that the very idea of a covenant with 
fallen sinners, the kind of expression of Himself 
which a covenant implies, is dishonouring to the 
ideas which we are bound to cherish concerning 
the absolute, infinite, and immutable God ; who 
has established the system of the universe with 
that excellent wisdom, that He has left no room 
for any accident or contingency which might call 
for such a transaction as that which this passage 
records. But, in addition to the fact, that the 
most deep and serious history in the world de- 
clares that the world's chief heroes and saints did 
live by faith in a covenanting God — did accept 



166 THE BEVELATION" 

and seal a covenant with Him, and made their 
lives noble and glorious by the resolution and 
struggle to keep it, — you will find, if you consider 
it closely, that without some distinct, exact expres- 
sion of God's mind and will on the subject of man 
and his future, the Fall must have buried man in 
the darkness of death for ever. Eemember the 
sentence is in man, in every man, by nature. 
Aclam hid himself, every man hides himself, 
when sin forces itself on his conscience ; and he 
knows that the doom is, and must be, death. The 
despair of the sinner, but for God's mercy, would 
crush him, would crush all of us, into the nether 
deeps. And what know we of God's mercy ? We 
may spin fine words and fine thoughts about it 
out of the stuff of our own imagination ; but no 
imagination of man has ever proved strong enough 
to be the foundation of his higher life. We 
may have learnt to think and talk of it familiarly 
as a thing unquestionable ; but for ages our fore- 
fathers have been living consciously in a covenant, 
and all our ideas of God have been formed by it. 
But ask that agonized father, plunging the bare 
knife into the throat of his daughter, or flinging 
his tender infant into that seething cauldron of 
fire, what man, ignorant of the covenant, knows 
of the mercy and forgiveness of God. Man lives 
on the covenant ; he builds his life on the 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 167 

promises ; it is the condition of his living at all 
in the sense in which a man may live. The notion 
of this wells up even in the midst of the pagan 
desert, and makes some green oases. It is the 
office of revelation to bring out the terms of that 
covenant (which, like all the higher bonds of 
relation between spiritual beings, becomes less 
explicit in terms as its spirit is better understood), 
that man may know and live by it, and attain to 
the strength and dignity of a being who is in 
solemn covenant with God. 

God led that people out that He might make 
them understand the full terms of that covenant 
which He sought to establish with them, and call 
out their intelligence and spiritual activity in 
response. There their moral life began : there 
every man's moral life begins. No man lives — he 
only exists — till he has set his hand to the record 
of his divine relations and duties, and said in a 
covenant which he would rather shed his heart's 
best blood than abandon, "I will serve the 
Lord." 

II. The second broad fact of the narrative is 
that God was seeking the covenant, not man. 

Man was not finding God, God was finding 
man, and bringing him near unto Himself. And 
this is the profounclest fact in the history of the 
great universe. Kedemption, spiritual life, the 



168 THE REVELATION" 

glory and bliss of heaven, all spring out of it. 
God seeking man, laying hold on man when 
rebellious and forgetful ; pledge of all long- 
suffering patience and tender love. The people 
vrere bondsmen, slaves, " dead in trespasses and 
sins," sitting by the flesh-pots, and forgetting 
utterly in their rank flavour the bread of heaven, 
when God's hand touched them, rekindled the 
dying memories, and re -illumined the faded records 
of their race. His hand led them out, having 
nerved them for the path of peril by the prodigies 
He wrought for their deliverance ; and He guided 
them by ways they knew not, feeding them daily 
from His own hand in heaven, until He set them 
in front of those beetling cliffs in that vast silence, 
and expounded to them the terms of a fuller cove- 
nant with Himself. It is God who acts, man who 
accepts ; God who gives, man who receives ; and 
thus the hope of man has its strong resting-place, 
not on the strivings of his own weak will, not on 
the searchings of his own too easily bewildered 
and blinded intellect, but on the eternal purpose 
and love of God. 

God cannot dispense with man's heart, will, 
and intellect ; He led that people there that He 
might engage them in His service. Kefuse Him 
that service, and the covenant is worthless to you, 
nay, is a witness against you to condemnation; 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 169 

yield them to Him, and rest in the assurance that 
your salvation depends not on your own weak 
work, but on the strong arm of God. I find in 
this idea, so powerfully developed in the narrative 
of the exodus, a strong prophetic preaching of the 
Gospel, which St. Paul more fully expounds : — 
' ' For by grace are ye saved through faith ; and 
that not of yourselves : it is the gift of God : not 
of works, lest any man should boast. For we are 
his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto 
good works, which God hath before ordained that 
we should walk in them." — Ephes. ii. 8-10. We 
talk of a covenant of works. The Jews under- 
stood it so ; but there was a Gospel — a Gospel of 
the grace of God in the heart of it. " I call 
heaven and earth to record this day against you, 
that I have set before you life and death, blessing 
and cursing : therefore choose life, that both thou 
and thy seed may live : that thou mayest love the 
Lord thy God, and that thou mayest obey his 
voice, and that thou mayest cleave unto him : for 
he is thy life, and the length of thy days : that 
thou mayest dwell in the land which the Lord 
sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and 
to Jacob, to give them." — Deut. xxx. 19, 20. 

Man seeking to propitiate God, to lay down the 
terms of a covenant under which he will consent 
to live, to offer that which may make him accept- 



170 THE REVELATION 

able in His sight, in whose hand " is the soul of 
every living creature, and the breath of all man- 
kind," passefch down inevitably into the darkness ; 
man believing in and loving a God seeking him, 
goeth up into the eternal clay. 

III. You will find two grand features in that 
which was transacted there on the Mount of God : 
God revealing Himself — God declaring His law. 
This was God's covenant ; the people had but to 
say in heart and with voice "Ainen." I shall 
consider the first, in what remains of this dis- 
course ; the second, the philosophy of the dis- 
pensation of law, will need fuller consideration by 
itself. 

God declares His name. 

The first lines of the Covenant were traced 
when God declared Himself to Moses, "And 
Moses said unto God, Behold,, when I come unto 
tHe children of Israel, and shall say unto them, 
The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you ; 
and they shall say to me, What is His name ? what 
shall I say unto them 1 And God said unto Moses, 
I AM TEAT I AM: and Re said, Thus slialt 
thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent 
me unto you. And God said moreover unto Moses, 
Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The 
Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, 
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 171 

me unto you : this is my name for ever, and this is 
my memorial unto all generations." — Exodus hi., 
13-15. 

An awful question for a people to have to ask, 
What is the name of God ? To us, familiar as 
we are with the Divine name, the question is 
hardly comprehensible. Nothing is so difficult 
for a Christian in this nineteenth century to 
realize, as the experience of a man looking round 
with awe and wonder on this vast universe, and 
asking himself, without a clue to the answer, 
what meaneth this mystery of life? To the 
infants of humanity, each dawn and each spring 
was a fresh and prolific wonder. The Yedas 
contain passionate questions, whether the sun 
will rise again from the lap of ocean; whether 
the night, as it falls, is to be the grave of the 
world ? We see behind the curtain ; we see 
the scope and capacity of the mechanism of 
creation ; and wonder — informed, instinct with 
knowledge, — gives place to faith, whereby, in a 
measure we are little conscious of, day by day we 
live. But, in the early ages, wonder was kept 
watching ; every seed, every river, every reptile, 
every child, was enveloped in mystery : who 
could expound the whence and the whither of 
this manifold teeming life of the world ? Every- 
where, in the springing corn, in the globe of fire, 



172 THE REVELATION 

which by some unknown unfathomable power 
daily traversed the sky, was an element of 
mystery which eluded man's keenest searchings. 
Should he call this "God?" Should he bow 
down and worship the unsearchable, in every 
form of nature, in every movement and manifes- 
tation of life ? Egypt had no better answer to 
the question. She worshipped birds, and beasts, 
and loathsome reptiles ; and knew neither the 
name of man, nor the name of God. A calm, 
blank look of baffled wonder is her most divine 
expression ; her Sphynx, too, is but half a man. 
To know God is the glory of a man ; that is 
manhood, and that alone. 

There is nothing to lift a man out of the 
whirl and suction of the great world engine, to 
stay him from swinging round helplessly with it 
in its circles as a mere atom of creation, but the 
knowledge of the name of God. This raises a man 
at once into the higher hemisphere of being. 
There is an eternal distinction between him and 
the creation which claims him, and will have 
him, unless he set up this protest, "I know 
and am known of God." And God declared His 
name — the Maker of the world, the Author and 
the Ruler of this manifold, mazy labyrinth of life. 
He laid His hand on every element in Egypt, 
and showed that it served Him. Bread and 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 173 

water, the staff of life, in the desert He had 
visibly consecrated with His hand. And now He 
set them before His grandest handiwork, and 
from the summit of the mount of God He pro- 
claimed His name. The Lord, who had shown 
Himself king of every element and creature that 
Egypt worshipped, was there before them, in a 
cloud of splendour on which their eyes could 
not prevail to look. To some a nearer vision 
was vouchsafed. " Then went up Moses, and 
Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the 
elders of Israel ; and they saw the God of Israel ; 
and there was under His feet as it were a paved 
work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the 
body of heaven in his clearness." — Exodus xxiv., 
9-10. But all heard Him ; all bowed down and 
worshipped Him ; all heard from His own lips 
the solution of the baffling mystery. " I am 
the Lord your God." What an emancipation ! 
Life was no longer a riddle, earth was no longer 
a maze. Egypt worshipped all things. Israel 
knew the Lord whom all things worshipped ; 
they could look with a man's free and mastering 
glance on all beings and all things around them 
in the world. 

The name of God is the key to the cipher of 
creation. Without the key, it baffles the finest 
intellect ; given the key, it is open to the under- 



174 THE KEVELATION 

standing of a child. Those hoary peaks, glowing 
with sunset splendour, that pallid moonlight, 
which threw a softening veil over their rough- 
ness, and left the shadows deeper in the hollows, 
were the creatures, the servitors of the Lord of 
Hosts. They felt that a new and grander dis- 
tinction grew up between themselves and wanton, 
slavish Egypt. She confounded, they could dis- 
tinguish, reverence, and magnify, the name of God. 
It is the true secret of life for every one of us. 
Nature, circumstance, the currents of life, master 
us, till we know the Divine Name. We know 
ourselves in knowing Him, and find in ourselves 
the broken features of His likeness. We become 
conscious of a life w T hich it is foul shame, wrong, 
and wretchedness to bury in the perdition of the 
creature. Nature may still present to us many 
insoluble problems. We may feel that there is 
still an awful mystery in life — in the mixture of 
good and evil in us, and in the world. But we 
have the key. We can face the Sphynx, w T e can 
hold up the head in front of the mass, force, and 
witchery of nature, for we know the name of the 
Lord. The first step towards the establishment 
of the covenant was the revelation of the Divine 
name. 

2. It was a merciful name which the Lord 
made known : " I am the Lord thy God, which 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 175 

have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, 
out of the house of bondage. I am the God of 
thy fathers." How tender, how blessed the 
assurance ! There was something awful in the 
revelation of the Divine name, though it emanci- 
pated them from all meaner dread. Like the 
rill of bright gushing water amid those sterile 
giant rocks ; like a clump of fair, sweet flowers 
amid a waste of desolate grandeur, else crush- 
ing to sense and soul, was this soft word, " the 
God of thy fathers," from such lips. To 
know God, is the first step out to spiritual 
freedom and manhood. To know that He is my 
God, the God of my fathers, the God of my 
pilgrimage, the God of my redemption, — that He 
yearns over me, clings to me, and with a strong 
right hand will save me, — lifts me up from the 
freedom of a man to the joy and fellowship of a 
son. God's revelation of Himself to Israel is full 
of such touches of tenderness. What a principle 
of unity, what a cement of national life is here ! 
" The God of our fathers " hath appeared to us ; 
we are a chosen and peculiar people, we have a 
name which God, the God of our fathers, has 
bestowed and consecrated ; we can only lose it by 
apostacy ; we cannot be despoiled of it by death." 
Most blessed to Israel, most blessed to us, is 
the revelation of the merciful name. What are 



176 THE REVELATION 

the toils and perils of the wilderness, what the 
pangs of thirst and hunger, what the hate and 
violence of foes ? The Lord our God hears 
us as on eagles' wings through the privations, 
and dangers, and sufferings of the Desert, and 
sets us unharmed, unstained in the Promised 
Land. Consider then, faint-hearted one, " that 
as a nurse cherish eth her child, so the Lord thy 
God cherisheth thee." 

3. The Lord's name is holy. " The Lord thy 
God is a holy Lord." 

A sensual-hearted man will fashion gods like 
unto himself. A wise and earnest-hearted man 
will " give thanks at the remembrance of God's 
holiness." There is something affecting in the 
struggle of man's heart, in all ages, to hold fast 
the belief in the holiness of God. The lust of 
man was too strong for his convictions, and his 
gods grew to be as sensual as himself. But he 
soon began to loathe and scorn them. Eome, in 
the age of Christ, made merry with her gods.* 
To persuade man that God winks at sin, and is 
ready to go partners in pleasure, is to make man 

* It is a very interesting question how far the atheism of 
such a deep thinker as Lucretius was an earnest protes'; against 
such gods as Rome told him of; a search after a more universal 
law of creation than Jupiter could explain to him, and so far 
his poem was constructive work. 



OF THE DIVINE NAME. 177 

blaspheme his Creator, and hate his very life. 
To tell man that God hates sin, is to open up a 
spring of hope and life to him, if he has heard 
the merciful name of God ; May I but know Him, 
he cries, my soul may be saved. The covenant 
declares such a God — " glorious in holiness," " a 
hater of sin." Many and terrible were the wit- 
nesses to this in their national history ; but the 
loss of the sense of it would have been national 
death. It is the great test of character. Can 
you rejoice in the holiness of the Lord ? Would 
you have a God like unto yourself, or a God such 
as the Scripture reveals to you, like whom you 
may hope to become ? To believe in the perfect 
holiness is essential to all who seek to be sanc- 
tified — to be made pure in heart that they may 
see God. How blessed the revelation that this 
God of awf a! holiness, " who cannot so much as 
look upon sin," has in mercy entered our world, 
to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. 
That He has made acquaintance with all the 
experiences of our nature, has been " tempted in 
all points like as we are," that He might succour 
our need. Those who can give thanks at the 
remembrance of His holiness are those who have 
seen Jesus, the great high-priest, before the 
throne. The law implies and necessitates the 
Gospel. Moses is the sure forerunner of Christ. 

12 



178 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 



Sinai. The Golden Calf— the Essential 
Nature of Idolatry. 

" Up, make us gods, which shall go before us" — Exocl. xxxii. 1. 

The most patent fact of man's history as a 
spiritual being is idolatry. It is man's dull form 
of the recognition of the spiritual powers. It is 
man's Amen to the sentence of the perplexed and 
baffled intellect, " Canst thou by searching find 
out God ? Canst thou find out the Almighty to 
perfection ? It is as high as heaven ; what 
canst thou do ? deeper than hell ; what canst 
thou know ? " The 32nd chapter of Exodus is 
its complete ' natural history. In one clay that 
people lived through the experience of the idola- 
trous world, from the first cry of the yearning 
want which begets the lust after an idol, to the 
last drop of bitterness in which, when' it is 
ground to powder, we have to drink its dust. 
Israel lived a typical life. The history of this 
people is in little all history ; and idolatry, the 
world's religion, receives its richest illustration from 
this record of Israel's life. It is manifestly a very 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 179 

deep question, and related very profoundly to 
man's spiritual nature in its present condition 
before God. It appears, not in paganism only, 
a' substitute for God among an ignorant and 
godless people, it appears in Judaism, it appears 
even in the Christian ages in the bosom of the 
Christian Church ; it is the great temptation, 
the easily besetting sin of all time. That surely 
must have a deeper root than mere ignorance of 
God, which sets up its images in the full blaze of 
the sunlight of the noon of the Christian ages, 
and fills the temples where the Ten Command- 
ments are blazoned on the walls, with idols which 
poor ignorant souls are tempted to bow down to 
instead of to Him. 

The history and philosophy of idolatry is too 
large a subject to be treated, even in outline, in 
such a discourse as this. But if we consider 
steadily this act of idolatry of the Jewish people, 
we shall discover some principles which will help 
us to understand its history and manifestations 
in the wide world. 

The common conception of idolatry is, that it 
is the refuge to which the soul betakes itself in 
utter ignorance of God, and when too debased 
and blinded to form any higher conception of 
His nature than the visible forms of creation can 
set forth. The idolater recognizes in nature the 

12—2 



180 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 



workings of a life which he cannot understand, 
which fill him with wonder, and which he gladly 
bows down to as divine. The idols of the heathen 
are mostly either dull imitations of the forms of 
nature ; or the result of an effort to express sym- 
bolically, by a combination of natural forms in 
one unnatural image, the idea of a power dwell- 
ing and working in various forms, but not to be 
identified with any particular creature. And this 
is in fact an effort of the human intellect to free 
itself from the mere creature worship, which in 
the long-run is the inevitable end of a turning 
away in spirit from the Lord. 

But let us consider it more closely; we may 
find occasion to modify this view. I observe, 
taking this history for my guide, — 

I. The very essence of idolatry is, not spiritual 
ignorance and obtuseness, but a wilful turning 
away from the spiritual knowledge and worship 
of God. 

I have already said in effect, that to understand 
idolatry you must not go to the stupid savage, 
the aboriginal Australian, or the South Sea 
Islander, who, knowing no better, takes a bit of 
stone or wood and makes it, or gets it made, into 
a god. Idolatry has degenerated into this, and 
it is its native tendency to bring men to this; 
but its essence is quite other than this, and 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 181 

must be sought for in the higher region of man's 
being and the nobler strata of man's history. 
You could never understand man by studying the 
savage form of him, by supposing that the savage 
is his original and typical image, and that the 
higher forms of human life present to us what 
man may grow to by culture and civilization. 
The savage is a degenerate man. The earliest 
records of the human race, in all countries, are 
" golden" legends : man in a golden age, man as 
we find him in Genesis, with much of the divine 
original about him, which in the savage is almost 
wholly lost. Civilization, society, moral and 
mental power and dignity, these present the 
normal status of man. You must study him 
under these his highest conditions, if you would 
understand his lowest ; Adam explains both 
Plato and the savage ; the savage explains not 
even himself. And the principle of these remarks 
bears directly on idolatry. The gross forms of 
it, to which it has sunk during the lapse of ages, 
must be explained by the finer and subtler, but 
equally fatal form, which is to be met with in 
the records of the historic races and the nobler 
times. Of all these records, unquestionably the 
most important, the most pregnant, is this. Let 
us study it, and get from it what light we 
may. 



182 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

1. This act of idolatry was in the very front of 
the majesty and splendour of Jehovah, revealed 
on Sinai. It was in the very face of the mount 
that might be touched and that burned with fire, 
and the sound of the trumpet, and the voice of 
words, by which the Lord God of Hosts was 
declaring Himself to them there. 

Let me beg you to note these words : — 

" And it came to pass, on the third day in the 
morning, that there were thunders and lightnings 
and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice 
of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the 
people that was in the camp trembled. And 
Moses brought forth the people out of the camp 
to meet with God ; and they stood at the nether 
part of the mount. And Mount Sinai was alto- 
gether on a smoke, because the Loed descended 
upon it in fire : and the smoke thereof ascended 
as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount 
qaaked greatly. And when the voice of the 
trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and 
louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by 
a voice. And the Lord came down upon Mount 
Sinai, on the top of the mount. And the Lord 
called Moses up to the top of the mount, and 
Moses went up." — Exod. xix. 16-20. 

" And all the people saw the thunderings, and 
the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 183 

the mountain smoking : and when the people 
saw it, they removed, and stood afar off. And 
they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and 
we will hear : but let not God speak with us, 
lest we die. And Moses said unto the people, 
Fear not : for God is come to prove you, and 
that His fear may be before your faces, that ye 
sin not. And the people stood afar off, and 
Moses drew near unto the thick darkness, where 
God was."— Exod. xx. 18-21. 

Now it was in front of all this, while the 
splendour still shone, while the cloud still 
lowered, while the thunders still echoed through 
the gorges of the resonant mountains, and the 
ground still quivered beneath their feet, " that 
the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron 
and said unto him, Up, make us gods which shall 
go before us ; for as for this Moses, the man that 
brought us up out of the land of Egypt, ive tvot not 
what is become of him." 

We have here a mental condition, at any rate, 
far removed from ignorance. They had heard 
the Divine Name ; they had entered into a solemn, 
explicit, binding covenant with God ; " all that 
the Lord hath spoken will we do." Their elders 
had "seen the God of Israel." Nor could they 
have forgotten it. That dense shroud over the 
brow of the mountain, from whose deep recesses 



184 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

ever and anon flashed forth the glory of the 
Lord, was, we may he sure, a sufficient memorial ; 
and yet filled with fear — that fear which is terror 
and "hath torment" — they made to them- 
selves a molten image and sang, " These be thy 
gods, Israel." It is a very awful chapter of 
man's history ; incredible, but that its comment 
is in our own hearts. It is the history of the 
genesis of all idolatries. Idolatry has not been 
born, after ages of degeneracy, to fill up a dread 
chasm in man's circle of knowledge, with some 
images which, at any rate, may stand as signs of 
the divine. We meet with idolatry in the morn- 
ing age, and in the morning land of history. 
Terah was idolatrous ; Laban was idolatrous ; 
Egypt was idolatrous; Assyria was idolatrous ; and 
that at a time when the echoes of the Divine Name, 
as it had been proclaimed to Noah, had not sunk 
in silence, and the traditions of divine truth had 
not faded from the memory of the most careless 
of mankind. God wrote His name over the 
temple of creation; man's art has blotted and 
obscured it. But while it was yet fresh, and 
man could read it reverently, idols were set up, 
and "the glory of the incorruptible God was 
changed into an image made like to corruptible 
man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and 
creeping things." Not more magnificently was 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 185 

the name of God emblazoned there in the heart 
of that mountain wilderness, than in the grandeur, 
the beauty, and the brightness of the world. 
" The heavens declare His glory, and the firma- 
ment showeth His handiwork. Day unto day 
uttereth speech of Him, and night unto night 
showeth knowledge." And the early idolaters 
heard it. The eye was not closed to the divine 
glory of creation, the ear was not shut to the 
tones of the divine voice which still lingered in 
the silent places of the world, when men " dark- 
ened their foolish hearts " into idolatry. 

Paul's argument on the origin of idolatry dis- 
tinctly asserts that it was when men " knew God, 
they glorified Him not as God," and sank into 
this deadly sin.— Eom. i. 18, 23. St. Paul's 
profound moral analysis of idolatry expounds this 
chapter, and this chapter of history sustains the 
conclusions of St. Paul. Neither the visible 
manifestation of the glory of the Lord in a spe- 
cially awful and impressive form on Sinai ; nor the 
declaration of the Divine Name as the wise and 
good One, the Author of order, the Fountain of 
blessing — in the harmony of the heavenly motions 
above us, in the grace, the sweetness, the bright- 
ness of the melodies of the earth around us, 
which bathe us in their atmospheres, and lift the 
spirit in joy to the footstool of the King who 



186 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

makes such music in His palaces, for the delight 
and instruction of His sons — can struggle against 
this prone tendency of the human heart to wor- 
ship idols, which first broke out in the very face 
of the revelation of Jehovah in His temple of 
creation, and has wrought on until it has ren- 
dered man by nature incapable of a pure know- 
ledge of and communion with Himself. 

Eemember, the people saw the glory of the 
God of Israel, and while the vision was there, 
and all its impressions fresh on their hearts, they 
made themselves a molten calf and sang, " These, 
Israel, be thy gods." 

2. The second remarkable and characteristic 
feature of this scene which I notice is, that after 
Aaron " had fashioned the molten calf with a 
graving-tool," and the people had said, " These 
be thy gods, Israel, which brought thee up out 
of the land of Egypt," " he built an altar before 
it ; and made proclamation, and said, To-morrow is a 
feast to the Lord." — Exod. xxxii. 5. 

With the idol before him, the priest proclaimed 
a feast unto the Lord ; and the people evidently 
entered into his thought, and with some dim 
notion that they were celebrating a divine festival, 
" they sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to 
dance." So this people, like the Samaritans in 
after ages, pleased themselves with the thought 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 187 

that they were " fearing the Lord, while they 
served their own gods." And I believe that the 
real heart of idolatry is here laid bare. It is, in 
plain terms, an effort to bring God within 
reach ; to escape the trouble, pain, and weari- 
ness of spiritual effort, and substitute the effort 
of the eye, hand, and tongue for the labour of 
the soul. 

You may find idolaters in throngs up and down 
the world, whose conception of God is no higher 
than the bit of stone, brass, or mud which they 
worship. But a missionary to the heathen would 
make but little way with them, if he were to pre- 
sume, in his appeals to them, that they imagined 
their idol to be God. The more thoughtful and 
earnest would testify that they have no such idea 
of God ; that God is above and beyond all repre- 
sentations ; that He is above even all particular 
deities ; but that this unknown Being connects 
Himself with certain places and images, so that 
the worshipper through them finds a way to Him. 
There are thoughtful men among idolaters in all 
ages, and this is what they say that they mean by 
their idol : that it is a thing with which God has 
connected Himself — through which He may be 
addressed, and by which He communicates with 
man. The ' ' winking Virgin ' ' and the fetish of the 
Gold Coast are on a level here ; each is conceived 



188 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

of as an agent or instrument — a means of mani- 
festation of the Divine. As we study the history 
of the earlier idolatries, tracking back the stream 
of time, this fact comes out with increasing clear- 
ness, until we meet with men who seem to have 
had a considerably intelligent belief in Jehovah, 
and yet to have sought to help that faith by 
images. A very remarkable instance and proof of 
this, the following passage will supply : — 

" Then Jacob rose up, and set his sons and his wives upon 
camels ; and he carried away all his cattle, and all his goods 
which he had gotten, the cattle of his getting, which he had 
gotten in Padan-aram, for to go to Isaac his father in the land 
of Canaan. And Laban went to shear his sheep : and Rachel 
had stolen the images that were her father's. And Jacob stole 
away unawares to Laban the Syrian, in that he told him not 
that he fled. So he fled with all that he had ; and he rose up, 
and passed over the river, and set his face toward the mount 
Gilead. And it was told Laban, on the third day, that Jacob 
was fled. And he took his brethren with him, and pursued 
after him seven days' journey ; and they overtook him in the 
mount Gilead. And God came to Laban the Syrian in a 
dream by night, and said unto him, Take heed that thou speak 
not to Jacob either good or bad. Then Laban overtook Jacob. 
Now Jacob had pitched his tent in the mount : and Laban 
with his brethren pitched in the mount of Gilead. And Laban 
said to Jacob, What hast thou done, that thou hast stolen 
away unawares to me, and carried away my daughters, as 
captives taken with the sword ? Wherefore didst thou flee 
away secretly, and steal away from me ; and didst not tell me, 
that I might have sent thee away with mirth and with songs, 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 189 



with tabret, and with harp ? And hast not suffered me to kiss 
my sons and my daughters ? Thou hast now done foolishly in so 
doing. It is in the power of my hand to do you hurt : but the 
God of your father spake unto me yesternight, saying, Take 
then heed that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad. And 
now, though thou wouldest needs be gone, because thou sore 
longedst after thy father's house, yet wherefore hast thou 
stolen my gods ? And Jacob answered and said to Laban, 
Because I was afraid : for I said, Peradventure thou wouldest 
take by force thy daughters from me." — Gen. xxxi. 17-31. 

Again : the Egyptians were the worst, the most 
complete idolaters, in the ancient world. Per- 
haps it was at them that St. Paul was specially 
glancing in the passage which I have quoted from 
the Eomans ; for a Koman satirist, of about the 
same age, assails their multitude of idols with 
his keen scorn. Now, in Exod. hi. 1, Mount 
Horeb is styled " the mount of God ; " and in all 
the communications between Moses and Pharaoh 
it is taken for granted that Pharaoh would under- 
stand their allusion to that mount of God, and 
their desire to sacrifice there. There is strong 
reason to believe that Mount Serbal, the nearest 
mountain of the Sinaitic chain to Egypt, was an 
old Egyptian sanctuary, and sacred to a more 
awful name than those of their domestic and 
municipal gods. I do not press this, but it is 
worth noting. 

Let me turn your attention to 2 Kings, 



190 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

xviii. 1-6. I extract the most important verse : 
— "Hezekiah removed the high places, and brake 
the images, and cut down the groves, and brake 
in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had 
made ; for unto those days the children of Israel 
did burn incense to it : and he called it Nehush- 
tan," — that is, a piece of brass. 

This piece of brass the Lord Himself had ex- 
pressly appointed to be looked to. His name 
was associated with it. It is impossible that the 
history of it could be quite forgotten ; and yet the 
people made it an idol, and Hezekiah ground 
it to powder. 

The preceding chapter, 2 Kings, xvii. 24-41, 
gives us the history of some idolaters who do not 
seem to have been very far from Laban's state of 
mind. The whole passage is of deep interest. 
But this is the leading point: — "Then one of 
the priests, whom they had carried away from 
Samaria, came and dwelt in Beth-el, and taught 
them how they should fear the Lord. Howbeit 
every nation made gods of their own, and put 
them in the houses of the high places. . . So 
these nations feared the Lord, and served their 
graven images, both their children, and their 
children's children : as did their fathers, so do 
they unto this day." 

These are deeply important and instructive 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 191 



chapters in the history of idolatry ; and they sug- 
gest the principle which lies at the heart of it, 
which explains at once the idolatry of the igno- 
rant savage, and that of the enlightened Church, 
which, knowing God, is prone to this deadly sin. It 
is the endeavour of the weak and faithless human 
spirit to connect God with something which he 
can handle and possess, so as to have a perpetual 
and palpable assurance of the presence and favour 
of Deity. In fact, it is an attempt to deal with 
that, by means of the senses and understanding, 
which only reveals itself to the spiritual faculties 
of the soul. I cannot too strongly impress upon 
you my conviction that the essence of idolatry is 
not the saying, " I do not care for the God of 
heaven ; I will not have the God of heaven to be 
my God, but will worship these." It is the say- 
ing, " I do not know the God of heaven; I do 
not know what He is, or where He is ; and I 
thankfully believe that He has associated Himself 
with this object which I do see and know, and 
that I hold this pledge of His presence and care." 
It .is impossible to suppose that Israel had 
forgotten, intellectually, the Lord who had led 
them. They had seen His wonders in the land 
of Ham ; they had been fed by His bounty every 
morning in the Wilderness ; they had the most 
terrible manifestations of His power at that moment 



192 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

before their eyes. Had Aaron wished them to 
declare themselves traitors to the Lord, to believe 
that their deliverance and guidance was all a mis- 
take, and that the Lord God of their fathers was 
all a delusion, I believe that they would have 
risen up and stoned him before the mount. They 
thought, in their ignorant and sensual hearts, that 
they were helping themselves to believe in Him ; 
and their old Egyptian memories rising up, they 
took the sacred image of Memphis, the bull 
Apis, and made that the image of their Lord. 
Moses, while he had been with them, had been 
their channel of communication ; God had visibly 
been with him, and he had been to Aaron and to 
thorn in the place of God. But his long absence, 
leaving them there shut up in the terrible wilder- 
ness, destroyed their confidence ; with Moses, God 
seemed to have abandoned them ; or rather, what 
knew they of God apart from him ? Moses w T as 
marked out to them as the man of God, by many 
infallible proofs ; and when he was gone, God 
faded into a mere name. It was the blackest 
ingratitude and faithlessness. The God who had 
led them thus far, could not have led them out to 
perish. Clouds and darkness w T ere round about 
Him ; but within those clouds they might be well 
assured that He was at work for them, devising 
fresh purposes of mercy, and perfecting fresh mini- 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 193 

stries of love. But it has its parallel in our history. 
You have been fed and guided in a way not less 
wonderful by the Lord's hand ; yet in some wilder- 
ness, when your guide has for a moment left you, 
and darkness has settled on the plain, I hear you 
crying, " The Lord has forsaken me, and my God 
has forgotten me ; " and I see some of you setting 
up a golden image and saying, " Let this be to 
us instead of God." How much of what is called 
"rest in the Church" — rest in some infallible 
human guidance — springs out of this root? So 
Aaron made them their molten calf, and pro- 
claimed through the host, " To-morrow is a feast 
unto the Lord." 

3. In God's sight, that is, in reality, this is a 
turning away from Him. 

They meant this bull to be an image of God, 
their Leader. God saw that it was an image of 
their own idolatrous and sensual hearts. They 
had, as every man has, the means of knowing the 
mind and will of God. From none who seek Him 
in faith will He hide Himself ; none who cry, in 
believing supplication, can be sent empty away. 
But faith and prayer, involving purity, come not 
readily to human hearts. It is easier and plea- 
santer to the flesh to have some nearer and 
morally cheaper guide : to have something which 
will at once allow us to choose our own course, 

13 



194 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

and yet appear to lend to it the sanction of the 
Divine name. Idolatry is just the act of a man 
who declines to seek the Lord in faith, and says, 
" Let the Lord be made plain to sense, and meet 
me in my daily customs, in the habits of my 
sensual life, that I may believe." It is a dull 
recognition of God, so far. The man does not 
dare to go on with his life unless he can believe 
that God goes with him ; but he dreads the Lord, 
and, like Kachel, takes the image with him in- 
stead. 

Does not this explain the idolatry of Judaism, 
where God was known — the idolatry of Romanism, 
where the God-man is known — the idolatry of 
Protestantism, where the Church, the letter of 
the Word, or the traditions of the religious world, 
are idols to careless, ease-loving, and sensual 
hearts ? The heart of man yearns after a fuller 
knowledge of God than our own intellectual 
searchings can give us. But God reveals Him- 
self only to faith : and faith is a power ; it 
changes the heart, it purges the life, it sets a 
man's back to the world, while it sets his face to 
God and heaven. But, suppose the face of the 
heart is turned to the world still, and the pure 
Lord, the pure Christ, only reveals Himself to 
those whose faces are set the other way ? Then 
man makes gods of saints and martyrs; "they 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 195 

are more pitiful to sin and weakness; they are 
men like us, and we shall be able, worshipping 
them, to keep a feast unto the Lord, and rise up 
to dance." " These be thy gods, Israel.'' 

To us the temptation to idolatry presents itself 
in a more subtle form. We dare not take any 
image and treat it as a god. Protestantism lives 
to protest against all that. But there is a habit 
of thought about God, which grows up in a mind 
not momently awake to the spiritual presence — a 
way of conceiving of Him as He looks upon and 
deals with us — the direct effect of which is to sus- 
pend the free, fresh, and constant spiritual com- 
munion with Him, by which alone can we come to 
know Him ; and to reduce spiritual life to a mere 
habit of thought or action, which, like a golden 
calf, may be made to go with us in any track we 
please. This habit of thought about God and 
divine things, which comes between the eye of 
the soul and the living God, may be embodied in 
elaborate church institutions, or it may reign 
among those who protest against elaborate church 
institutions, in the popular sentiment and judg- 
ment of a community ; which of all spiritual des- 
potisms is perhaps the most formidable, because* 
the least visible and avowed ; but reign where it 
may, its work is everywhere the same, and its 
fruit. 

13—2 



196 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

The advantage of an idol is, that we can take 
it with us, and its way becomes very pleasantly 
our way. God will not go with us, we must go 
with Him; and the multitude, who see not the 
issues of either way, their own or God's, cleave 
to their idols even before His face. Thus men 
take their own course, and get, as they fondly 
hope, a divine benediction upon it, till the prophet 
appears, and their idol gets ground to dust. 

II. Let us consider the contrast between the 
prophet and the priest. 

The priests and the prophets divide the spiritual 
empire of humanity between them. The priest's 
function is to conduct for man his divine relations 
and transactions ; the prophet's, to speak to man 
the truth of God. The priest's office here sup- 
poses a system of intercourse between man and 
God already established and recognized ; the 
prophet's pre-supposes nothing but the two beings 
— the human soul and God. The priests have, 
in all ages, been the willing ministers of idolatry ; 
at least, as an order, they have rarely lifted up 
their voice against it, unless inspired by the pro- 
phets of truth. There is something in a formal 
official duty which identifies a man with the cus- 
tomary and common, which gives him a direct 
interest in the status in quo, which is never the 
best. If the people are set on idolatry, they can 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 197 

always find priests to help them, and to lend the 
sanction of their great authority to the dishonour 
of the Divine name. 

But God has a band of men upon earth — they 
are not an order, they wear no badge, and know 
no traditions — through whom He speaks to man- 
kind. They are men whom the cloud and the 
fire do not drive to a distance ; whose eagle sight 
can pierce the cloud and gaze on the glory, and 
who can bear the " burden" of the Lord's word 
in trust for their fellow-men. The man who pro- 
fesses to conduct man's transactions with the 
spiritual world, and the man who has to declare 
God's truth to men, rarely, in any age, are at one. 
The prophet becomes the censor of the priest- 
hood ; while the priesthood marks the prophet as 
a man to be silenced, and, if possible, put down. 
The perfect Mediator is both priest and prophet : 
He reveals God to man in conducting man to 
God. The Christian priesthood — in the only 
sense in which I understand the term, the whole 
body of those who are kings and priests to God 
through Christ — partakes of this double character. 
But what age has found it up to the mark of the 
idea of God ? Aaron led the people, or rather 
helped the people — the professional priest is 
rarely leader in anything — into idolatry. Moses 
rescued them, at what cost we will briefly trace. 



198 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

Idolatry dishonours God doubly. It disobeys 
Him, it tramples in the dust His. most solemn 
commandments ; and it dishonours the faculties 
which He has endowed man withal, that he may 
be able to know and commune with Himself. Its 
fruit in all countries, in all ages, and under all 
forms, is bitterness and death. As a symbol of 
this, Moses ground their calf to powder, and 
made them drink it with their daily food. And 
the world is drinking still the dust of its idola- 
tries. There are few who are not expiating some 
creature-worship, whereby they have robbed the 
Lord. Man, disusing the god-like faculty, ceases 
to be god-like ; his holiest powers shrivel, and he 
becomes at last the mere shell or husk of himself. 
The penalty of making an image of God to the 
sense, instead of seeking God with the soul, is 
the destruction of all in man which has affinity 
with the Divine. The soul, turning from its true 
activity, is palsied ; the senses take possession of 
the man, and make havoc at their will. The 
connection between idolatry and the grossest sen- 
suality is universal : there has never been an 
idolatry which has not borne this fruit. I am not 
saying that idolaters have never struggled against 
this ; some have struggled against it heroically. 
Pagan Eevivals, too, have a history. But the pres- 
sure has been too strong for them ; and the sen- 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 199 

sual passions have, in the end, never failed to 
drag down whole peoples, a whole world, to wallow 
in the grossest sin. This is no accident. The 
soul expands and grows to strength and mastery 
in the sunlight of the Divine presence ; let that 
be shaded, and the man, like the children of an 
Arctic winter, becomes inevitably gross and carnal 
as the brutes. Greece and Home were drinking 
the very dregs of the cup of the idol when Paul 
went forth to preach to them. Words of man 
cannot describe the bitterness, the heart-sickness, 
of the whole pagan world when the Lord ap- 
peared. And man's lower nature is bloodthirsty. 
" "Whence come wars and fightings among you ? 
Come they not hence, even of your lusts ? " And 
whence come lusts ? Come they not of this 
effort to set the creature and the creature-god in 
the place of the Lord ? The bloody tragedy in 
which this brief idolatry ended, is a most signifi- 
cant picture. Man's idols have gathered his hosts 
to fields of ensanguined slaughter, have led the 
shock of his armies, and heaped up the trophies 
of his slain, from the day when Levi made him- 
self a name by his zeal in the work of retribu- 
tion, to the day when the nations shall close in 
vengeance on the seat of the idolatrous church. 

III. I said that the central principle of idolatry 
is the shrinking of the spirit from the God of 



200 THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 

heaven; which soon passes into spiritual igno- 
rance, and utters itself in the cry, " I do not 
know the God of heaven; give rue some form, 
some visible, tangible shape, to persuade me He 
is near." It is the glory of the incarnation, that 
it presents that image of the invisible God, "the 
express image of His substance," which is not an 
idol ; that it gives into the arms of the yearning, 
straining spirit a man, a brother, a husband of 
the heart, and declares that He — the man Christ 
Jesus, the man of sorrows and sympathies, the 
brother born for adversities — is the God of 
heaven. Moses longed for such a revelation 
when he cried, " I beseech Thee show me Thy 
glory." God recognized the need of the people 
in the ark and the mercy-seat, and in the visible 
glory which dwelt among them. But the true 
glory is man. Man, the image of God, is the 
true shekinah ; and the cry grew strong and pas- 
sionate through the ages, which uttered itself by 
the lips of Philip, "Lord, show us the Father, 
and it sufficeth us." Jesus answered, " He that 

HATH SEEN Me, HATH SEEN THE FATHER ; " and 

put away that ground of idolatry for ever. 

It is to deny Jesus, to rob his incarnation of 
reality, his brotherhood of tenderness, his com- 
munion of completeness, to set up a mediator 
between man and the Brother of every human 



THE ESSENCE OF IDOLATRY. 201 

heart. The Eomanist thinks that the Virgin, the 
woman, will be nearer and more pitiful than 
Jesus, and makes her his idol ; if she seems too 
far, too pure, he has his saint. But to turn to an 
idol is to deny, not the unknown King of heaven, 
but the man Christ Jesus. "It is to trample 
under foot the Son of God, and to count the 
blood of the covenant wherewith He sanctified 
Himself an unholy thing, and to do despite to 
the spirit of grace." To turn from the splendours 
of Sinai, which revealed the Lord Jehovah, to 
worship a golden image, was corruption ; to turn 
from the God-man, the true shekinah, to worship 
an image, or to interpose a second mediator, is 
death. 



202 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 



J§5potS VL 
Sinai : The Dispensation of Law. 

"And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to 
fear the Lord our God, for our good always." — Deut. vi, 24. 

The dispensation of law ! The unfolding to 
man's intelligence the inner principle of all 
the concords of the universe — the thoughts of 
the mind of God. This is what a dispensation 
of law means, if we look into its depths. The 
idea of the Divine mind is the principle of the 
exquisite concord of creation. It shaped itself, 
or rather, it lay from eternity shaped and com- 
pacted in His mind, so perfect in its composure 
that the expression of it in form would be music ; 
and so, when God's eternal thought clothed itself 
in creation, the melody floated upward, and all 
the morning stars, it is pictured, sang together 
for joy. Each thing on the earth and in the 
heaven was fashioned according to the pattern in 
the sanctuary of the heaven of heavens — the 
mind of God. And each thing received, with its 
form, the principle of its relations and movements, 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 203 

the observing of which, through the ages, is the 
condition of the beauty and order of the world. 
The rhythm of the march of the forms and forces 
of creation was then established ; the axis of the 
earth with its very nutations, the orbits of the 
stars, the tint and fragrance of the flowers, were 
then decreed. These — the inner principles and 
methods of the life of the universe, expressed in 
forms cognizable by the understanding — are the 
law r s of creation ; to know them, as we have come 
to know the truth of the movements of the starry 
heavens, is to be within the council-chamber of 
the Eternal, and to be able to think out, after 
Him, the thoughts of God. To know the laws 
which inhere in all things is the highest glory, 
the completest triumph of the intellect ; as the 
glory of a spirit is to know, by spiritual senses, 
and commune with G-od. We have a fashion of 
thinking and speaking of law at large, as though 
it were a humiliation, to the spirit at any rate, to 
deal with it — as though, to be under the law, even 
to God, were the badge of serfdom instead of the 
condition of freedom, as it is, and shall be through 
eternity. " Under the law to Christ" is Paul's 
description of the freest Christian life to which 
man has ever attained. That is, under the law, 
not to a code written on tables, but to a Being 
whom the heart knows and loves, whom the spirit 



204 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 

recognizes as its centre and its sun ; and this is 
the secret of glorious life. 

Law to a transgressor stands out in a new rela- 
tion ; it acts as a constraint from without, not as 
a life moving the muscles of action from within. 
This is a degradation, but the degradation is in 
the transgressor and not in the law. The law is 
still holy, good, and beautiful ; it is still God's 
thought expressed. It represents what the trans- 
gressor was made to be, and should be, in order 
to enter into God's concord, and fill his appointed 
space in the scale of creation. Let the trans- 
gressor take the law into his heart and love it, 
and it will move him as blessedly, as the sun- 
quickened sap in the veins of a plant stirs the 
buds to bursting, and presses out, with soft com- 
pulsion, the leaves, the branches, the flowers, the 
fruit. We have this guarantee about God's law. 
Its principle is harmony, order, perfect blessed- 
ness. His law is not strange or arbitrary. None 
can obey it and be still out of concord with the 
universe and with Him. If He says to a child, 
" Honour thy father and thy mother," and to a 
parent, " Provoke not thy child to wrath," He 
says that which, if fulfilled, is the secret of the 
concord of homes. If He says to the merchant, 
" Thou shalt not go beyond nor defraud thy 
brother in anything," He says that which, if ful- 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 205 

filled, will make order in the jarring world of 
commerce. Nothing which he ordains can be 
of the nature of a peremptory or despotic com- 
mand, the only reason of which is the despot's 
will ; the doing of which may lift us into his 
favour and buy his benediction, but which adds 
no blessing or riches to our inner life. Every 
w T ord which He speaks man can live by. Let him 
take the word into his heart, and its fruit must 
be concord ; it must bring the life into harmony 
with the universal life and with Himself. This is 
the point which the Jews quite missed. They 
lost the key to their dispensation, and turned it 
into a yoke which neither they nor their sons 
were able to bear. Instead of feeling that there 
was a grand reality in it, that this was the form 
of a perfect life, sketched out by God's own 
hand, for a people in a mental, moral, and social 
condition like theirs, and that living it would 
make exquisite order in their homes and hearts, 
they set themselves wearily to do it ; as you would 
do a despot's will, seeing no reason in it and 
having no hope, save that you might win the 
despot's favour and secure his rewards. And thus 
it became a bondage, a yoke of serfdom ; not 
because of its own bright nature, but because of 
the corruption of the nature out of which it had 
to bring forth its fruits. 



206 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 

Imagine, if you can, the automatic processes of 
our body suspended, and that we were com- 
manded to expand and contract the heart by a 
distinct volition, and to distend and exhaust the 
lungs ; what a fearful bondage would our ex- 
istence become ! Life carries on these operations 
gaily ; it halts not, it wearies not ; it is conscious 
of no stress or strain through the years. So 
the Jews made to themselves a yoke of bondage 
out of the living and loving commandments of 
the Lord. They lost the vital principle of ful- 
filment; the life within, becoming cold and 
feeble, refused to work out the complete idea 
of God. Then having it as a mere command- 
ment, having lost the reason and love of it, 
they made ghastly spasmodic efforts to fulfil 
it, and became the most lifeless of formalists, 
the most abject of intellectual and spiritual 
slaves. 

But I cannot consent, for one moment, to the 
idea that God's law, as proclaimed on Sinai, was 
other than good and beautiful — most germane, in 
every jot and tittle of it, to a noble personal and 
national life. We often speak of it hastily, and 
with a certain outward truth — as when we say 
that the sun rises and sets — as a system of bond- 
age. It became so ; with such a people it could 
not fail to become so; but in itself it claims to be 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 207 

handled reverently. There was a sensual-hearted 
people before the face of God, a mere rabble of 
enslaved souls ; and the law which they heard 
from Sinai was the complete deliverance of the 
mind of God, as to what would make them a 
nation of noble freemen, and secure order, har- 
mony, and blessedness in their personal, domestic, 
and national life. Very sublime are the words of 
Moses, God's great witness to this view of the 
law: — " For this commandment which I com- 
mand thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, 
neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that 
thou shoulclest say, Who shall go up for us to 
heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear 
it, and do it ? Neither is it beyond the sea, 
that thou shoulclest say, Who shall go over the 
sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may 
hear it, and do it ? But the word is very nigh 
unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that 
thou mayest do it. ... I call heaven and earth 
to record this day against you, that I have set 
before you life and death, blessing and cursing : 
therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed 
may live : that thou mayest love the Lord thy 
God, and that thou mayest obey His voice, and 
that thou mayest cleave unto Him : for He is thy 
life, and the length of thy days : that thou mayest 
dwell in the land which the Lord sware unto thy 



208 THE DISPENSATION" OF LAW. 

fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to 
give thern." — Deut. xxx. 11-14; 19, 20. 

I. Let us examine a little more closely the 
popular idea as to the excessive severity and for- 
mality of this law. To a transgressor who had 
not in him the living principle of obedience, it 
was, without doubt, fearfully formal and stern. 
So is our statute-book to a felon, while on you 
and me it sits lightly as the air. We are quietly, 
without being the least conscious of it, living out 
a whole statute-book every day. If you talk of 
formality and severity, consult the statute-book 
of the starry heavens ; conceive the order of the 
procession of the planets written out on tables — 
each movement, through orbits the units of whose 
measures no brain can carry, defined to the breadth 
of a hair. There is form, sublime in its formality, 
severity, awful in its righteousness and constancy. 
Equally overwhelming, as we have already hinted, 
would be the revelation of the laws of bodily, 
domestic, or political life, in the form of a statute- 
book. We should start with horror to find what 
formalists we are in our freedom ; how prescribed 
are the motions of the most complete and royal 
faculties of sense and soul. In fact, to find the 
law is to find freedom. A flower, ordained to the 
sunlight, is a serf in the darkness ; a soul, or- 
dained to holiness, is a slave in sin. Outlaws are 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 209 

ever outcasts ; — out of law, out of fellowship, 
order, happiness, as long as the outlawry lasts. 
St. James speaks of a perfect law of liberty, and 
he utters deep truth. Liberty is perfect, in per- 
fect obedience to the perfect law. The powers 
are free, and have free play, when they find their 
full expression and action in harmony with the 
mind of Him who fashioned them, and touched 
them to that particular use. 

The Jewish system, as I understand it, is the 
complete statute-book of a life under those par- 
ticular conditions ; not for you and me in all its 
details, but for you and me wherever it deals with 
that common human nature wherein they and we 
are one. But in its details it is for them — a 
people in a particular country, climate, and stage 
of development ; and it contains in these spe- 
cialities the sentence of its own abolition when it 
had done its appointed work. Most formal it 
would be to us, in such a state of development 
as we have reached to ; to us it could but be, in 
its sacrificial system, for instance, an arbitrary 
and despotic law ; but to them most perfect in 
its adaptation ; the one condition then and there 
of a complete national life. 

Many seek the key to it in the future. They 
say that it was provisional and preparatory, and 
that the Jews were shut up under their law as in 

14 



210 THE DISPENSATION" OF LAW. 

a kind of prison-house, until the emancipation 
day of the Gospel. There is a great truth in 
this way of representing it, and a great untruth. 
God sees the end from the beginning, and every- 
thing which is, has relation to something which 
is to be. What else does " natura " mean? 
There is strict concatenation in nature ; all things 
are knit by golden chains, of which the links 
deeply interlace, to the throne of God. There 
would have been no Judaism if there had been 
no Gospel ; but we dare go further, and say that 
there would have been no Eden, no Man, if there 
had been no Gospel. The Gospel underlies the 
whole of man's history ; and wherever the inte- 
rest of that history deepens and becomes con- 
centrated, as at Sinai, be sure that its relation 
to the Gospel will come out with singular fulness 
and force. 

But it is false to conceive of any age as merely 
a stalking-horse for a future age. It is a mistake 
to conceive of the Jews as laden with special 
burdens, sacrificial or otherwise, that we in the 
fulness of time might better understand and profit 
by the Gospel. It is fatal to all just thought, 
thus to interpret the equal ways of the Lord. 
Judaism was given from Sinai to that people, for 
that people's good. There was no forethought, 
no afterthought — except as the Divine reason 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 211 

looks ever before and after. It was God's best 
gift to them as they stood there before the moun- 
tain ; and there was nothing in it which was not 
a good gift to them there. Its relation to the 
future was their relation to the future ; in train- 
ing, educating, and developing them, it was 
making a future possible to their nation and to 
the world. 

I observe — 

II. That the very heart's core of a dispensa- 
tion of law is duty, and duty is the master-key 
to life. 

God led them forth to give them a law in 
Horeb — that is, to train them in duty, to make 
them servants of duty, and lead them thus into 
the inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies of life. 
That is what is meant by a dispensation of law. 
I say the very core and kernel of the idea of law, 
in its relation to a moral agent, is duty. Law is 
the buttress of right : its object is to fortify the 
dutiful soul. There must be a precedent right 
in the claim which the law makes, or it is 
immoral, and tends to confusion in the soul 
and in the world. The real object of law is to 
help men to do right, and thus most effectually 
restrain from wrong; unless there be a sentiment 
of duty latent, which the lav; can appeal to and 
elicit, it is heartless and hopeless work. Law, 

14—2 



212 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 

explicit and mandatory, declares the right, and 
man's heart and conscience respond Amen. 

To bring forth that Amen, a manly, outspoken 
consent to the law, that it was good, God led 
that people forth from Egypt into the heart of 
those sublime and magnificent mountains ; where, 
like as on another mountain, after a yet diviner 
fashion, He opened his mouth and taught them 
out of His law. It was the first clear revelation 
of duty to them. There are laws which are right 
by a higher sanction than the voice of our own 
hearts, which but echoes the sanction. The 
echo we can trifle and tamper with ; we can 
make it by our cunning babble folly or false- 
hood ; but who shall dare tamper with the word 
of Him who speaks by that awful thunder, whose 
words glow and glare in that blazing lightning, 
the sight of whose glory, the touch of whose 
hand, is death ? Those lightnings of Sinai lit up 
a whole heaven of duty. From the first word of 
the law to the last, there was not a letter which 
did not demand attention and obedience on 
grounds deep as infinity, lasting as eternity, 
and sacred as the name of God. They became 
the soldiers of duty from that hour. They gave 
instant consent to the covenant of God. "And 
Moses came and told the people all the words 
of the Lord, and all the judgments : and all the 



THE DISPENSATION" OF LAW. 213 

people answered with one voice, and said, All 
the words which the Lord hath said will we do. 
And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord, and 
rose up early in the morning, and builded an 
altar under the hill, and twelve pillars, according 
to the twelve tribes of Israel. . . . And he 
took the book of the covenant, and read in the 
audience of the people : and they said, All that 
the Lord hath said will we do, and be obedient. 
And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on 
the people, and said, Behold the blood of the 
covenant, which the Lord hath made with you 
concerning all these words. — Exod. xxiv. 3, 4 
-7, 8. 

They felt that there was a right, all-pervading 
as the air of Heaven ; and that their lives had 
become sacred to duty. Not as men who accepted 
a law which they could not help submitting to, 
but as men who said Amen to a law which they 
heartily believed, which they knew to be right, 
and which they accepted as spiritual beings be- 
cause of its lightness, they sealed their covenant 
with God. It was duty which God preached 
from Sinai ; and duty is, as I have said, the 
master-key of man's life. Let a man live for 
duty, and he lives nobly ; his life will be a bene- 
diction to men. Let a man live carelessly, aim- 
lessly, walking in the sight of his own eyes, and 



214 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 

the imagination of his own heart, and he lives 
weakly, shamefully ; his life becomes a snare and 
a curse to himself and to mankind. 

Sinai was to the world the revelation of duty, 
which grows out of the revelation of the name of 
God. Earth knew the meaning of duty from that 
hour, for she knew the name of her King. The 
vague convictions of righteousness and sanctity 
which floated through pagan consciences, and 
ever and anon wrung such fearful sacrifices from 
agonized pagan hearts, have received form and 
certainty from the declarations of Sinai. The 
words which were then written on tables of stone 
with God's own finger are still, and ever will be, 
the commandments of the world. Life dies down 
in a soul, in a people, when the sentiment of 
duty is not matured into a principle, and does 
not rule the conduct. A life which has no 
duties, no offices of trust and obligation, which 
has simply to expand itself in bland enjoyment, 
wearies at last the most weak and babyish heart. 

Man, out of the bond of duty, explains all 
the world's disorders, all its frustrated hopes, 
all its withered, ruined lives. Man, the servant 
of duty, explains all noble, manlike, beautiful 
deeds and ministries — a life bright as the sun- 
light, and musical as the symphonies of heaven. 
Our lives mean nothing, and produce nothing, 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 215 

till the revelation of duty breaks on us ; till we, 
led forth to some silent wilderness, see a form 
and hear a voice, which makes us the bound 
servants of righteousness to the end of our days. 
All life's real concords and true pleasures spring 
out of its duties. The soul set to this key is in 
that presence, " where there is fulness of joy and 
pleasures for evermore." 

To some, duty, like law, seems a cheerless and 
rayless thing. The sun thinks not thus, when 
he "rejoiceth as a bridegroom coming out of 
his chamber, or a strong man to run a race/' 
There is a sunny joy in the motion, the life, 
of all creatures, which to the tuned and attentive 
ear is music — which is but the hum of duty in 
the acting. The song of the creation is the 
hymn of duty. Every bird that sings, every 
bee that hums, every flower that lifts its tremu- 
lous voice of praise to Him who has made so 
good a world, every star, 

" Which in its motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins," 

bears its part in the great flood of harmony which 
floats the tributes of the duty of creation before 
the Eternal throne. For man, duty in the doing 
is glory in the winning. " To them who by 
patient continuance in well-doing " — the com- 
plete picture of duty — " seek glory, honour, and 



216 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 

immortality, eternal life." Duty stands watching 
like the guardian spirit, with folded wings and 
eyes dewy with tears, over the cradle where an 
infant sobs and gasps into life. Duty, in the 
mien and dress of a mother, feeds the young 
nursling with self-forgetful tenderness, and guides 
its feeble steps as it explores the limits of the 
kingdom to which the child believes himself heir. 
Duty, when he steps out of his charmed home 
into life's highway, leads him by the hand into 
the great forum, and there leaves him to his 
heaven-appointed work. He may turn his back 
and slink through life, with craven branded on 
his brow; or he may face it manfully, giving 
open-hearted welcome to a man's cares and 
sorrows, knowing that they bring with them in 
their train a man's consolations and joys. Such 
an one will find that the most costly services are 
richest in blessing ; the self-denials and deeds of 
duty which have scared the very root of self in 
the soul, and racked him with sharp agony, have 
become, when the agony was over, perennial 
bubbling fountains of consolation and bliss. 
Which are your richest memories, your most 
living springs of joy and hope ? Those, I well 
know, which you opened in some hour of solemn 
sadness, when you yoked yourself to a duty to 
which you did not easily tame a rebellious heart. 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 217 

Perish gold, fame, knowledge ! but leave me my 
memory of duty — those tablets, blotted with tears, 
but precious, inexpressibly precious, to my soul 
through eternity ! Are there any echoes to this 
in the inner chambers of your being, or have you 
yet to be led out to the wilderness to listen to the 
law ? It is the first step into life, to see the 
heaven of duty, and, clear shining in its zenith, 
beaming down on us with unutterable benignity, 
ineffable serenity, as of one who, though the 
Lord of duty, had " learnt obedience by suffering," 
the face of Emanuel, God with us. The people 
had learnt to exist by the flesh-pots of Egypt; 
but they must go forth into the wilderness, and 
stand before the Lord in Horeb, to learn to live. 

III. The receiving of a law was the first step of 
the people in a new and glorious career of per- 
sonal and national development ; which, though 
they have missed the crown, has left them the 
most notable, powerful, and capable race in the 
world. 

In other words, it opened a noble man's career 
to them ; it will open the same to you. 

They came out of Egypt a straggling, dis- 
orderly throng ; they broke up and marched from 
Sinai in orderly array — an army, a nation, a 
church. The key to their transformation was this 
dispensation of law. It gave them a standard ; 



218 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 

thenceforth they had unity, and a history. When 
a man says, " this is right; I am very far from 
fulfilling it, hut I believe in it, I will work up to 
it;" his life has a meaning and a result which 
the mere child of the world, however brilliant his 
talents, never attains. In this case the whole 
people had a law of conduct, a standard of action, 
remaining changeless through the ages, with 
which the national character and life might com- 
pare itself ; and by which the nation attained to 
a completer liberty than has ever been realized 
by any nation upon earth, except, perhaps, our 
own. Let the character of the legal dispensa- 
tion be tested by its results in the history of the 
people, and it will appear, as Paul says, to be 
glorious. Formal as it appears to us, burden- 
somely minute in detail and severe in discipline, 
yet it made incomparably the most noble, free, 
deep-hearted, and fruitful people in the ancient 
world. 

The real liberties of man, the real dignity of 
woman, the nature of the home, the state, the 
church, were never so well understood and so 
fully set forth in the life of a people, until that 
most heaven-ordained and fruitful of all marriages 
was consummated, the marriage of the Anglo- 
Saxon race to Christianity. The Jews were the 
Anglo-Saxons of the old world. The nation was 






THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 219 

a community of freemen ; each with his allot- 
ment of land — a freeholder whose rights were 
guarded with most jealous vigilance, who was 
forbidden to sell or alienate his land under the 
severest penalties : and thus they were able to 
maintain the political freedom of each member of 
the nation, against that fearful propension to 
slavery, which we see destroying, in turn, every 
great empire of the ancient world. The world, 
in old times, gravitated towards slavery. The 
Greeks and the Komans saw the fatal tendency, 
but found no remedy. The real cancer of the 
Empire was slavery ; this was the fell disease 
which preyed upon its vitals and dragged it down 
to perdition. The Jews alone bore up against 
the temptation heroically. They remained a 
nation of freemen, even to the very last. So 
deeply was this passion for political liberty rooted, 
that the Komans found it necessary to deal with 
them more cautiously than with the other con- 
quered nations ; and to respect the form, at 
any rate, of freedom, until the nation, by suicide, 
asserted its freedom in death. 

These words, in Deuteronomy xv., implanted a 
seed which bore fruit in the national history for 
1,500 years: — 

" And if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an 
Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve 



220 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 

thee six years ; then in the seventh year thou 
shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou 
sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let 
him go away empty : thou shalt furnish him 
liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, 
and out of thy wine -press : of that wherewith the 
Lord thy God hath blessed thee, thou shalt give 
unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou 
wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the 
Lord thy God redeemed thee : therefore I com- 
mand thee this thing to-day. And it shall be, if 
he say unto thee, I will not go away from thee 
(because he loveth thee and thine house, because 
he is well with thee) ; then thou shalt take an 
awl, and thrust it through his ear unto the door, 
and he shall be thy servant for ever. And also 
unto thy maid-servant thou shalt do likewise. It 
shall not seem hard unto thee, when thou sendest 
him away free from thee ; for he hath been worth 
a double hired servant to thee, in serving thee six 
years : and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in 
all that thou doest."— Deut. xv. 12-18. 

I wish you would carefully contrast the history 
of their tumultuous and disorderly exodus, with 
the history of their breaking up from the encamp- 
ment before Sinai, and resumption of the Canaan- 
ward march. It is wonderful what their law 
had already done for them. There is something 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 221 

sublime in the order with which that band of 
fugitive bondmen arranged themselves around 
their tabernacle, and took their way through the 
dreary wilderness. In the midst of the vast 
wastes, with many temptations to stray or to tarry, 
they took their march in the exactest order, and 
encompassed, with a resolution which could not 
be vanquished, the shrine of their national faith. 
When settled in Canaan, and scattered at first in 
tribes, and even in families, amidst a hostile 
population — engaged much like the Anglo-Saxons 
in England, in hand-to-hand conflicts with the 
former masters of the soil — one thing alone pre- 
served their unity, and brought them forth from 
this stage of national trial and temptation — their 
law, and the ark of the testimony and the Taber- 
nacle in Shiloh. That was the centre of the 
scattered bands of Israel, the heart which main- 
tained vital communications with the remotest 
members of the national frame. Settled at length 
more completely, and organized as a nation, their 
law set them on high above all the nations of the 
earth, in every point which is material to national 
greatness. It stirred the deep fountains of their 
deep hearts, and produced a literature whose 
influence at this day, through the length and 
breadth of the civilized world, is incomparably 
the mightiest motor of the human intellect and 



222 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 

spirit ; and which, in the breadth and depth of 
human passion which it awakens, and human 
power which it wields, casts the rarest produc- 
tions of classical antiquity into the shade. Plato's 
Kepublic may be a store of political wisdom for 
the accomplished scholar; there is rare honey 
stored there for the use of even modern society. 
But Isaiah's prophecies — Isaiah's glowing picture 
of what a State must be to fulfil the idea of God, 
and develop instead of dwarfing its citizens — is a 
book which you should keep in your counting- 
house in the heart of the bustling city, and is at 
this clay as true and fruitful for Cheapside and 
Clapham, as it was for the traffic and the homes 
of Jerusalem. 

When I consider the history of this great 
people, constituted a people there before the rock 
of Horeb ; their gallant conquest of Canaan ; 
their heroic victory over the temptation to scatter 
themselves and be lost to history during the era 
of the Judges ; their deep-thoughted prophets ; 
their wise-hearted kings ; the freedom of their 
political, and the sacredness of their domestic life ; 
their hatred of serfdom; their noble defence of 
their mountain home against the massive strength 
of the two greatest monarchies of the earth ; their 
splendid and profound literature ; their world- 
renowned hymns ; — and consider further that by 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 223 

God's law they were what they were — I magnify 
the grace and wisdom which led them forth to 
the shrine of that sublime and awful temple of 
Sinai; and I join reverently in the hymn of the 
heavenly temple, which blends the song of Moses 
and of the Lamb, u Great and marvellous are Thy 
works, Lord God Almighty ; just and true are all 
Thy ways, thou King of saints." 

I wish I could make you feel more deeply, that 
putting yourself under the law to God, is the first 
step out into a true man's life. " Man lives and 
works in the Idea," says a deep thinker. Unless 
a man has set himself a standard of action, and 
made a covenant with his soul that he will make 
it the work of his life to fulfil it, his life is aimless, 
hopeless, " without understanding, and like the 
brutes that perish." If a man has an inward idea 
of duty, and daily seeks strength to deny and 
conquer himself, that he may come nearer to it, 
there is a true growth and progress — that man 
has a character and a history. I say to you, 
come under the law to Christ, " for the grace of 
God that bringeth salvation hath appeared unto 
all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness 
and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righte- 
ously, and godly, in this present world ; looking 
for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing 
of the great God, and our Saviour Jesus Christ," 



221 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 

(Titus ii. 11, 12) — because this is the standard, 
and here the true idea- of life is to be found. 
Hereby shall every conviction cherished by your 
spiritual nature be nourished, and herein shall 
every passion of your soul rejoice. Your man's 
life, buried in dust and darkness in Adam, comes 
forth and aims at glory in Christ ; to whom it 
passes under the law, and through whom, " the 
righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us, who 
walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit." 
The first step out into life is to put yourself under 
the yoke of duty to the Lord Jesus ; and to make 
it the aim of your being to live up to your cove- 
nant with Him. 

Alas ! what a dreary, aimless, joyless, hopeless 
life many of you are living, who have never found 
courage to get out into the wilderness, and there 
in silence and solitude make covenant with God. 
Your days are slipping away, and you are gaining 
nothing ; many a battle you have had, with here 
and there a victory; many a resolution has been 
formed, acted on for a space, and then forsaken ; 
and you are as far from a real Christian life and 
the kingdom of heaven as at first. Why, what a 
life is this ! Like the sands through the hour- 
glass your days flow on, and then you turn it and 
the sand flows through again, but no fruit — 
nothing that remains, endures, and must endure 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 225 

through eternity. Build on the rock, course by 
course, with calm and patient courage, that the 
edifice of life may grow stronger and stronger 
against the marauding temptations which throng 
this wilderness, and promise to stand fair and 
stately amid the last wreck and crash of all things, 
and to be a habitation of the soul for eternity. 
No longer let Egypt waste and spoil the treasures 
of your being, after this vile fashion ; say now in 
heart, I will play at living no longer, I will go out 
into the wilderness and be awhile there, alone 
with God. 

IV. But, however we may magnify it, and 
however justly, the law is not a Gospel, and can 
in nowise supply the place of a Gospel to the 
world. 

The legal dispensation was, historically, the 
great stage of preparation for the fulness of times, 
and for the advent of Him who "is the end of 
the law for righteousness to every one that 
believe th." And the dispensation of law, in our 
individual histories, is but " a schoolmaster to 
bring us to Christ/ ' Man can only be blessed 
by being brought into the peace of God; into 
harmony with God's constitution of things, and 
with God Himself. The Gospel is the instrument 
of the reconciliation which the law declares to be 
needful, but cannot secure. If you want to 

15 



226 THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 



master the relations of Law and Gospel, study 
closely the passage from Komans vii. 1 to viii. 4. 
You will see there how a man, who has seen the 
solemnly serene and beautiful aspect of law, re- 
pelling him from God, revealing the awful sacred- 
ness of the divine constitution of things, which he 
profanes and tramples on every hour, cries out in 
ecstacy when he hears the name of Jesus, "I thank 
my God through Jesus Christ my Lord." To that 
man the righteousness of the law becomes a solemn 
reality. Without righteousness he will not dare 
to appear before God, and he joys in Him who is 
the " Lord our righteousness;" whose righteous- 
ness by faith is in us as well as on us, for "the 
righteousness of the law is fulfilled in us, who walk 
not after the flesh but after the spirit." 

No man who has not felt the sacredness of 
duty, the divine strength and glory of law, under- 
stands all that is in the Gospel. Those who have 
stood before the mount, see most of the glory of 
the cross on Calvary. The ear that is harassed 
and oppressed by the roarings of the thunder of 
the mount of testimony — and it becomes terrible 
to the sinner — catches joyfully the ineffable sweet- 
ness of the voice of the Eedeemer, " And I, if I 
be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." 

We talk familiarly of the abolition of the law 
of commandments. Let us understand what it 



THE DISPENSATION OF LAW. 227 

means. I know but of one way of abolishing 
law — hiding it in the heart. Let it be read there 
in living characters, and the law is abolished, as 
I hope you have abolished it. Abolish it by so 
hiding it within that your whole nature is instinct 
with it, and fulfils it calmly and noiselessly, as a 
sensitive -plant shrinks from contact, or an angel 
shrinks from sin. But let no man dare to think 
that the Gospel loosens the tightness of our moral 
obligation, or lowers by one half-tone the pitch of 
that concord into which the Saviour calls us — 
such heap to themselves a double damnation. 
But blessed be the God and Father of our Lord 
Jeses Christ, that while the law remains as a 
witness, the Gospel is preached as the means of 
reconciliation ; " For God is in Christ reconciling 
the world unto Himself, not imputing our tres- 
passes unto us ; for He hath made Him to be sin 
for us who knew no sin, that we might be made 
the righteousness of God in Him." 



15—2 



228 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 



£tmm % 

The Gospel under the Law. 

"And thou shalt put the mercy-seat above upon the ark; and 
in the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee." 
— Exod. xxv. 21. 

God is one. There can be but one Gospel of 
God. There is but one way of salvation for man, 
every when and every where. Unity of dispensa- 
tion, is a conception imperatively demanded by 
the unity of God. If dispensations appear to us 
to be diverse and progressive, establishing, in suc- 
cessive ages, various terms of relation between 
man and God, the progress is in the apprehen- 
sion of the beings who are the subjects of the 
dispensation, and not in the Divine idea. God's 
basis of intercourse with the fallen sinner, in all 
countries and in all ages, and in all stages of his 
culture, is ultimately one and simple — Himself. 
In God Himself is, and ever has been, that on 
which the reconciliation of the sinner to the 
Divine holiness rests. That eldest word of pro- 
mise, which lit the first steps of the weary march 
of man — the pilgrim of the ages, and the last 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 229 

word of benediction when the pilgrimage is over, 
spring from the same fountain, rest on the same 
basis, and express the same fundamental purpose 
— a great moral necessity to a being who loves 
as God loves — to redeem man by sacrifice to 
Himself. 

Speaking more closely to the truth of things,, 
there could have been no basis of reconciliation, 
no justification, peculiar to the patriarchal or the 
Jewish ages, differing essentially from that which 
was reserved for revelation to these Christian 
times. If a patriarch, or a Jew under the law, 
received forgiveness of- sins, and walked as a 
friend, a child, in holy fellowship with God, it 
must have been on the same ground, and by the, 
same way as that by which a Christian walks with 
God, and receives and exercises the power to 
become a son. For God remains One through 
the ages ; and the relation of man to Him being, 
a spiritual thing, is a simple and absolute thing, 
and must, likewise, remain one : so that the^ 
faith by which Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, 
and David walked, is the identical faith by which 
St. Paul lived his life in the flesh ; and the salva- 
tion at which they aimed, and which, by faith, 
they realized, is essentially the same salvation as 
that in which St. Paul gloried, " the receiving the 
adoption of a son." Spiritual things do not 



230 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 



change, die, and reappear. Their dress changes, 
their form of manifestation changes, the measure 
in which they are apprehended by the intellect, 
and the mode in which they are set forth, change ; 
but the thing itself, the spiritual state of a being- 
reconciled, and in living fellowship with God, does 
not change ; that abides one, as God is One, 
through all time, through all eternity. 

To discern the principle of man's reconciliation 
with God in one age, is to discern it for all ages. 
The Gospel can but unfold explicitly what was 
enfolded implicitly — not in the formal words and 
institutions — but in the whole dispensation of the 
law. God's promise to Adam, was God's Gospel 
to Adam. God's covenant with the Jewish people, 
was the Gospel to the Jewish people ; and it is 
substantially the same Gospel, springing out of 
the same fountain in Himself, and resting on the 
same basis in His work, as that which reveals the 
whole heaven of His redeeming wisdom and love, 
in the redemption which is by Christ Jesus. 

God cannot alter His terms of relation with 
human beings. A Jew cannot be saved on one 
ground, and we on another. It is confusion to 
imagine that there was a basis of a more formal 
and narrower kind open to them, which is open 
no longer ; a new ground having been revealed 
in Christ, as that on which alone, in these Chris- 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 231 

tian ages, a man can rest. Discover the ground 
of relation between man and God anywhere, and, 
like the plutonic bed of the earth, it is universal. 
It is the Gospel of all ages which the Bible un- 
folds to us ; and I think that its selectest and com- 
pletest symbol is the image presented in my text 
— a mercy- seat above an ark of testimony. Law 
looking up to enthroned "and regnant mercy ; 
mercy guarding, cherishing, and glorifying law. 

In studying, as I feel it is very important to 
study, what was presented as a Gospel to the 
Jewish people, and which, if my position be true, 
must contain substantially the broad truths of the 
universal Gospel, the Gospel which is preached 
also unto us, I observe — 

I. We have here the very core of the sym- 
bolical ordinances of the Jewish Church. 

I have no call to enter here into the general 
question of ecclesiastical symbolism. Neither is 
it needful to dwell at length on the special signi- 
ficance and worth of the symbolism of the Jewish 
dispensation. Probably we are all agreed that 
the worth of a sign is the measure, of the thing 
signified, which it presents to the mind or soul. 
We shall be equally agreed that, organized as we 
are, clothed spirits, the contemning of symbols — 
the resolution to deal with what we may choose 
to consider the naked reality of things — is a con- 



232 THE GOSPEL UXDER THE LAW. 

temning of the counsels of God ; who, whatever 
He has made us, has not made us naked spirits in 
a naked world. 

The word of God, the essential truth of things, 
has forms in which it presents itself, according 
to their several natures, to body, mind, and spirit. 
The whole visible creation is a garment, or body, 
in which God presents what of Himself can be so 
presented, to the touch of the senses, and the facul- 
ties which correspond with the senses, in the soul. 
The unity of Him, whose thought runs through 
the whole scale of creation, fills the universe 
with analogues. Each note contains the chord, 
and the octaves carry it forth beyond our bounds. 
Truth, again, consents to take shape in formal 
propositions, that it may furnish matter for the 
exercise of the intellect, — the final function of 
which is, not to know as if knowing were the 
end of being, but to enlarge and lift the spirit ; 
that, by its own royal faculty, it may know truth, 
by knowing Him who is the truth, whom to know 
is life. But the propositions in which the truth 
unfolds itself to the cognizance of the intellectual 
faculty, though true, are not the Truth. That 
ever transcends them ; that inheres in a Being. 
And only by that in a man which is capable of 
knowing a spiritual being, can the Truth be 
known. But it is when ideas, which have to 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 233 

do directly and absolutely with the spiritual in 
man, clothe so much of themselves as can be 
clothed in sensuous forms, and address him by 
the methods by which creation addresses him 
on behalf of God, that the difficult question 
arises — How far is such symbolism helpful or 
hurtful to the spiritual faculty, whose direct and 
healthy action on the realities of spiritual truth 
it seems to supersede ? And there is no general 
form of answer. The question of milk or meat as 
food for children, cannot be answered in generals; 
it is entirely a matter of wise discernment, whether 
the higher form of nourishment will clog the 
immature digestion, or, whether the continued 
administration of the lower form will keep in 
chronic impotence the maturing powers of the 
frame. One thing let us note, that meat, ma- 
terial and spiritual, demands the higher effort ; 
and as man is indisposed to high effort in the 
upper hemisphere of his nature, there is a stand- 
ing danger lest the religious symbol should be- 
come the downy sleeping-bed of the indolent and 
faithless soul. 

The Jewish dispensation was largely symbolic. 
It dealt in tropes, figures, pictures, suited to an 
avowed infancy of mankind. But that which we 
seek to convey to a child by pictures, is surely 
not a thought or a fact which is true for children 



234 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

only, and has no truth for a man. It is the very 
thing which is hereafter to occupy his manly hours, 
which you are seeking to impart to him in ways 
suited to the feeble insight and weak digestion of 
an infantile soul. The question is, after all, not 
of the sign, but of the thing signified : how much 
of that can in any way be made known? Let 
men's supreme attention be bent on that — the 
end of the symbol, and they will cease wrangling 
about the forms. Any dress, any speech, any ges- 
ture, will do to bring a much-loved friend into 
the presence of the soul. There were those in 
Judaism to whom the milk of the symbol was 
almost more than they could take in. There were 
those, in various grades of development, whose 
spiritual concern was but slight with the signs of 
their dispensation : " Thou desirest not sacrifice, 
else would I give it ; Thou delightest not in burnt 
offering " (Ps. li. 16) , said one when he fell into 
the depths. The forms of the dispensation, at such 
a moment to such an one, were no more than are 
the garb and manner of the friend in whose clear 
eyes one is reading the responses of a devoted 
heart. 

We speak familiarly of the dispensation as a 
symbolic dispensation. The symbols were there; 
they are here ; thoy are everywhere. There were 
those who, under that order of things, lived life- 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 235 

long in a world of shadows ; there are such here, 
under this. While there were those to whom the 
veil, so opaque to others, was translucent, they 
saw a vague light beyond it ; to some, again, it 
was fully transparent, and they (call them patri- 
archs, Jews, or what you will) were the free citi- 
zens of the kingdom of heaven. Head St. Paul, 
in 2 Cor. hi. The whole chapter is full of light 
on this subject. In the 14th verse he says : — 

" But their minds were blinded Even 

unto this day, when Moses is read the veil is upon 
their heart" The veil was not on the things, but 
in the heart of the people ; if we see more purely, 
it is because we bring an open face to behold the 
glory — because, through Christ, the veil is lifted 
off our hearts. 

We have, as I have said, the very core of the 
ritual dispensation here. There 'was a tabernacle 
— a holy place ; then there was a portion shut off 
by a veil, and called the most holy place; (shall 
we say that these correspond, the one to the whole 
mass of the called nation, and the other to the 
inner circle of those who were walking humbly 
and lovingly with their God) ; and then in the very 
centre — the core and marrow of the whole — there 
was the ark, with its mercy-seat above, and the 
veiling cherubim of glory, presenting that which 
was in the heart of the Jewish nation, the one 



236 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

essential principle of its moral vitality — the mer- 
ciful, righteous God. 

At this point all the interest of the dispensa- 
tion is concentrated. The days of that people's 
life as a spiritual community all array themselves 
around that day, when their high-priest, their 
daysman — who represented their nation in 
shadow, as Christ, in substance, represents the 
world — entered that inner sanctuary with the in- 
cense of his people's prayers and the blood of his 
people's sacrifice, and received commission from 
the Lord God who dwelt between the cherubim, 
to lay the sins of the nation on a victim, who 
should bear them into the wilderness away. Here, 
then, is the focus of the spiritual power of the 
dispensation, I mean its power to order man's 
spiritual relations with all things and with God. 
And hither, to this mercy-seat above the ark, we 
are to look — if my principle, that this is a typical 
people, typical of you and me, be a right one — for 
those elements of the good word of God to the 
men of that dispensation, which relate it to the 
universal Gospel of God to man, and to all worlds 
— God's method of "reconciling all things to 
Himself." 

II. Let us pass within the shrine, and behold 
what it has to reveal. 

"And thou slialt make an ark of shittim wood ; 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 237 

. . and thou shalt overlay it ivith pure 
gold. . . . And thou shalt put into the ark the 
testimony which I shall give thee. And thou shalt 

make a mercy-seat of pure gold And 

thou shalt make two cherubims of gold . . . in 
the two ends of the mercy -seat . . . And thou 
shalt put the mercy-seat above upon the ark ; and in 
the ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give 
thee. And there I will meet with thee, and I will 
commune with thee from above the mercy-seat, from 
betiveen the tivo cherubims ivhich are upon the ark 
of the testimony, of all things ivhich I will give thee 
in commandment unto the children of Israel.^ — 
Exocl. xxv. 10-22, passim. 

1. What is the supreme symbol here ? 

The last, the highest, the crown of the whole, 
is the mercy-seat. 

And this appears to me to mean more, infinitely 
more, than a promise of forgiveness, upon certain 
terms. The fact that with the mercy-seat God 
completed and crowned the symbolism of the 
Jewish dispensation ; that He only felt it fit to 
be His habitation and organ of expression when 
that mercy-seat was set there over the ark ; that 
till then it was a mere shell of a dispensation — as 
Adam's body was a mere shell of a man until 
God had breathed into his nostrils the breath of 
life — but that when the mercy- seat was set, it 



238 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

became capable of entertaining the Divine glory, 
and became, in fact, inspired ; this fact, I say, is 
the broad, grand declaration to Judaism of the 
essential nature of God. It was the utterance to 
that age, of the word which by ten thousand half- 
articulate voices has been uttering itself to man 
since the first days of the creation, and has now 
become fully articulate in Christ, — God is Love. 

The mercy-seat being the chosen place of 
God's presence and manifestation, seems intended 
to declare solemnly something about God Himself, 
His name, His nature, that out of which all His 
purposes and operations proceed. It proclaims not 
the mercy of God, but that God is merciful ; not 
that God will love, but that God is Love. It asso- 
ciates, as indissoluble, the name of God with the 
quality of mercy. Eighteousness is His attribute ; 
law is His utterance ; they are there within the 
ark which His glory shrouds ; but He, the living- 
Lord, is on the mercy-seat — He is Love. 

I believe, brethren, that we shall be very far 
from the true teaching of this passage if we jin- 
derstand by it, that God was willing, at times, [to 
appear on that mercy-seat, as a monarch on his 
throne, in benignant mood, to hear and answer 
the prayers of His people. It means much more 
than that : it means that God is merciful, that 
God ever was merciful, that God must be merciful ; 



THE GOSPEL TTXDER THE LAW. 239 

that there is in His heart that deep fount of mercy, 
deep as His own being, out of which all actual 
forgivenesses and reconciliations spring. 

The mercy-seat above the ark. I dwell specially 
on that. Not leyond it, not behind it, so that 
the ark was the only approach to it ; but above it, 
crowning it as a flower crowns its leaves, or a 
head its limbs. 

Understand that God's mercy, God's great love 
to man, goes before all acts of forgiveness. God 
does not forgive on conditions, when men seek 
Him. He forgives because it delights Him to 
forgive. The conditions, as they appear to us, 
prescribe the way in which alone, in the very 
nature of things, His forgiveness can be bestowed, 
on the one hand, and enjoyed on the other. Mercy 
is precedent to forgiveness. The knowledge of 
the essential love and mercifulness of God kindles 
the desire and hope of forgiveness in the sinner's 
heart. It is the sight of the mercy-seat as God's 
dwelling-place which makes sin dreadful to the 
awakened sinner. " With Thee there is mercy that 
Thou may est be feared," cried one who had 
fathomed the depths of the subject. God shows 
Himself in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
Himself, as His strong appeal to the world to be 
reconciled to Him. God has proclaimed before 
humanity in all generations His merciful name ; 



240 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

it is the primeval fact on which the life of 
humanity rests. Man's uprightness perished 
from beneath him, melted like a wave from under 
his feet, in the hour of the first transgression ; he 
had plunged down then and there into the nether 
abyss of darkness to which gravitate all waste and 
wreck, but that God spread beneath his feet in 
that hour, firm and strong as the pillars of His 
eternal throne, His own merciful name. There 
man's redemption begins. The Lamb was slain 
in that hour, on the true altar, the Father's heart. 
And there redemption completes itself, in the 
satisfaction of that merciful heart of God. 

In the ordering of the mercy- seat, then, above 
the ark of the testimony, crowning the ritual of 
the dispensation — the special seat of the manifes- 
tation of the Eternal — I discern the proclamation 
of that foundation truth of the universal Gospel 
out of which all redemption springs, — God is Love. 
The truth is the same for them and for us ; the 
substance of the proclamation is the same ; the 
difference lies here, they heard the word, and 
saw the glory, but " Hereby know we the 
love of God, because He laid down His life 
fob us." 

2. Beneath the mercy-seat, within its bosom, 
as it were, was the ark of the testimony, and in 
it the word of the law. 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 241 

It would be a great mistake to imagine that 
the two tables of stone are exclusively referred to, 
when we meet with the words " testimony " or 
" law " in the Old Testament scripture. The 
two tables are but portions of a legal code, 
it may be the very essence of the code, the 
whole summed in brief — though the Lord teaches 
us that it is capable of a yet briefer summary — 
but still to be looked at and dealt with in connec- 
tion with the whole system of commandments, 
of which they were the most prominent features. 
When we speak of the mercy-seat as above the 
ark, and in inseparable connection with it, we 
regard the whole Jewish system as ministrant to 
that mercy which the mercy- seat declares. The 
image here reveals a harmony — the tables of stone 
in the ark, the mercy-seat above it, crowning 
it, and the glory of the Lord enveloping the 
whole. The two ideas are inseparable — mercy 
and righteousness — when we connect them with 
the Divine name. " Mercy and truth have met 
together, righteousness and peace have kissed 
each other," in every manifestation of the love of 
God to man. 

In order to enter fully into this idea, we must 
remember that the declaration of the mercifulness 
of God, the assertion, however solemn may be 
the form, that God is Love, is not a Gospel to 

10 



242 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

man. The Gospel is " a way of salvation ; " the 
way in which that pure love and man's impurity 
may be brought into relation with each other ; 
the way in which a lost image may be recovered, 
a lost harmony restored, a lost home regained. 
And therefore, within the bosom of the ark, over 
which the Mercy brooded with outstretched wings, 
was hidden the testimony of God. The mercy- 
seat declares His love, it reveals His essential 
nature, as the fundamental basis on which the 
Gospel rests, or rather the root out of which it 
springs. But we must turn to the testimonies, to 
understand the way in which alone the mercy 
which is reigning there can work towards its 
victory. 

i. The first aspect which the testimonies pre- 
sent to man in his present moral condition is, as 
a witness against sin. 

This is not in their essential nature, as we 
have seen, but it is inevitable in the present moral 
condition of mankind. The very first aim of 
God's testimony to the Jewish people was to force 
home on their consciences the conviction of sin. 

God is merciful ; God is Love. But until you 
have added to that, the confession, "lam sinful, 
I am alienated from that Love," the Gospel is 
still hidden from your heart. The law, full of a 
benign meaning to the obedient soul, is full of 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 243 

deadly menace to the corrupt and erring. " The 
law is holy," says St. Paul, " and the command- 
ment holy, and just, and good;" but to me, 
the convicted sinner, it becomes the minister of 
death. And God set His testimonies beneath 
His mercy-seat, that they* might convince us, 
convict us, and terrify us, if we will not be drawn, 
into an intense concern about our spiritual state ; 
that they might probe the depth of our nature, 
lay bare the diseased centres of action, and bring 
us to cry, crushed down to the very dust in an 
agony of self-abasement and despair, " miser- 
able man that I am, who shall deliver me from 
the body of this death?" It is between man, the 
sinner, and God, the Saviour, that those most 
blessed relations have to be established, which are 
to fill heaven with glory and bliss. To show man 
as the manifest sinner, and to show Himself as 
the manifest Saviour, is the deep purpose. of God: 
and he begins — under the law, under the Gospel, 
the method is one — by laying bare the deadly, 
and, out of Him, the hopeless malady of the 
human heart. Any other Gospel, any Gospel 
which began its work by making light of the 
transgressions which it undertook to cure, man's 
conscience would spurn.* 

* I have treated this subject much more at large in the 
earlier portion of a former yolume, " The Divine Life of Man." 

16—2 



244 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

I say that the method is one under the law and 
under the Gospel. Here are the hurning words 
of the commandment, flashing the light of heaven 
in upon the sinner's heart and life ; and there, 
under the Gospel, the very first work of the Holy 
Ghost, the Comforter, is conviction, for "He, 
when He is come, shall convince the world of sin, 
of righteousness, and of judgment." The first 
Gospel sermon filled men with an awful terror. 
They thought of the deed which they had done — 
and it was not their private deed, it was man's ; 
had we been there we had done it — and they 
trembled and quaked to the innermost chambers 
of their hearts. We may say that one great 
object of the death of Christ was to reveal what 
sin was capable of, and to drive the conviction 
home. Never till the world had slain the Holy 
One and the Just, and exposed the Divine love 
to the shame and torture of the Cross, did j sin 
reveal to man its deadly, damning character ; 
never till then were the deepest fountains}[of 
contrition unsealed in human hearts. The law 
was there, under the mercy-seat, that the sinner, 
self- convinced and self- condemned, might stand 
there, and know, as such only can know, the 
depth of the riches of the love of God. 

But we must explore the testimonies further. 

ii. No man can study the commandments of 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 245 

God to the Jewish people, without coming across 
the idea of sacrifice; without the blood of a victim, 
without an offering of atonement, the high-priest 
of the Jewish people, their mediator, durst not 
lift that veil, or stand before that throne, lest the 
splendour should wither him away. 

" And Aaron shall take of the congregation of the children 
of Israel two kids of the goats for a sin offering, and one ram 
for a burnt offering. And Aaron shall offer his bullock of the 
sin offering, which is for himself, and make an atonement for 
himself, and for his house. And he shall take the two goats, 
and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle 
of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two 
goats ; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scape- 
goat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's 
lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on 
which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive 
before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let 
him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness. And Aaron shall 
bring the bullock of the sin offering, which is for himself, and 
shall make an atonement for himself, and for his house, and 
shall kill the bullock of the sin offering which is ior himself : 
And he shall take a censer full of burning coals of fire from 
off the altar before the Lord, and his hands full of sweet 
incense beaten small, and bring it within the veil : and he 
shall put the incense upon the fire before the Lord, that the 
cloud of the incense may cover the mercy- seat that is upon the 
testimony, that he die not : and he shall take of the blood of 
the bullock, and sprinkle it with his finger upon the mercy- 
seat eastward ; and before the mercy- seat shall he sprinkle of 
the blood with his finger seven times. Then shall he kill the 
goat of the sin offering, that is for his people, and bring his 



246 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

blood within the veil, and do with that blood as he did with 
the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it upon the mercy-seat, 
and before the mercy-seat : and he shall make an atonement 
for the holy place, because of the uncleanness of the children 
of Israel, and because of their transgressions in all their sins : 
and so shall he do for the tabernacle of the congregation, that 
remaineth among them in the midst of their uncleanness. And 
there shall be no man in the tabernacle of the congregation 
when he goeth in to make an atonement in the holy place, 
until he come out, and have made an atonement for himself, 
and for his household, and for all the congregation of Israel. 
And he shall go out unto the altar that is before the Lord, and 
make an atonement for it ; and shall take of the blood of the 
bullock, and of the blood of the goat, and put it upon the 
horns of the altar round about. And he shall sprinkle of the 
blood upon it with his finger seven times, and cleanse it, and 
hallow it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel. And 
when he hath made an end of reconciling the holy place, and 
the tabernacle of the congregation, and the altar, he shall 
bring the live goat : and Aaron shall lay both his hands upon 
the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities 
of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their 
sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send 
him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness : and 
the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not 
inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness." — 
Levit. xvi. 3-22. 

Tills shedding of the blood of the appointed 
sacrifice, was the condition of the manifestation of 
mercy from the throne. And here we open up 
questions which it is easier to bury under plati- 
tudes than to solve. My object in the present 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. M? 

series of discourses is to consider, what the 
wilderness history presents to us; the human 
conditions and experiences of those who are 
brought into a relation to God like that of the 
Jewish people, rather than to analyze the con- 
ditions and methods of the self-manifestation 
of God in reconciling His rebellious children to 
Himself. This is a book of experience rather 
than of theology. I therefore do not enter into 
any elaborate argument on the subject of sacrifice 
generally. Indeed there is little need that I 
should do so, as in a recent pamphlet on the 
"Divine Fatherhood in Relation to the Atone- 
ment," I have expressed my views upon that 
subject fully. 

But in glancing at this subject, the Jewish 
sacrifices, shall we say that God has many kinds 
of sacrifice, which, under various conditions, He 
holds to be acceptable and sufficient ? that the 
terms of His relation with men vary in successive 
generations ; that a people in old time, who 
sprinkled the blood of a slain bullock, offered to 
Him a sufficient and acceptable atonement ; while 
from us, if we offered a hecatomb, He would turn 
sternly away. This is a notion about God's ways 
largely entertained in some theological schools, 
but it seems to me most full of peril. I believe 
that there is no more fertile source of wrong 



248 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

thinking about Divine things, and its fruit, 
unbelief, than the notion that there is "yea 
and nay," about a matter as fundamental and 
essential as sacrifice, with God. 

Must we not say, that before God there is, 
there can be, but one sufficient sacrifice for sins ? 
That from the hour when Adam fell, to the hour 
when the last of the redeemed shall be gathered 
home, there is but one simple, absolute, sufficient 
ground of the justification of souls. That every 
transaction of God in relation to man's trans- 
gression not only rests on it, but springs out of 
it. That every act of forgiveness, every promise 
to the transgressor, seeks its justification there. 
So that for Jew, for Gentile, for patriarchal, 
legal, and Christian dispensations, there is but 
one atonement before the Father, one Daysman, 
one Mediator, one High Priest, who, through 
death, has become also King. I believe that this 
is the simple, absolute truth; and that we shall 
get into utter confusion if we suppose, as the 
whole truth of the matter, that God forgave the 
Jewish penitent on the ground of his animal 
sacrifice, as being the thing enjoined on him, 
while he deals upon deeper grounds with us. 
The truth is, that God looked upon that Jewish 
penitent and his bleeding victim, and dealt with 
him on the ground of His own great sacrifice, 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 249 

which even then was before Him ; and that all 
the feelings, thoughts, and associations which 
clustered around the Jewish institution of sacri- 
fice, drew all their virtue from the unseen foun- 
tain of the perfect sacrifice, as moons absorb the 
lustre of an unseen sun. 

The sacrifice of Christ, when offered visibly on 
earth, was at once to justify — that is, to reveal 
the unseen basis of — past forgivenesses, and to 
show to the future the ground on which all its 
divine relations must rest. God had this before 
Him from the first, as the deep ground of His 
acts of mercy; and revealed it in progressive 
measures, as it could be borne by the strengthen- 
ing spiritual vision of man. 

I say, " in progressive measures." Nothing 
can be further from the truth of things, than 
to maintain that the Jew who derived any vital 
help from his sacrificial institutions, must have 
been intellectually conscious of the real basis on 
which his justification rested, and been thus a 
conscious prophet of the suffering of our Lord. 
He was a prophet, but a mute one. There were 
men who from the height of their prophetic 
eyrie looked over the gulf of ages, and " spake 
beforehand of the sufferings of Christ, and the 
glory that should follow." But the Scripture 
assures us that they themselves saw but dimly, 



250 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

and understood but feebly, that whereof they 
spake ; and we may be sure that the multitude 
of their countrymen understood still less. But 
God understood it — that was the great matter. 
God offered the sacrifice ; God accepted it ; and 
on the ground of it justified every Jewish wor- 
shipper who put himself into spiritual relation 
with Himself. This last point is essential. To 
justify is a spiritual act ; to be justified is a 
spiritual reception of an act. A careless, sen- 
sual soul can no more appropriate the virtue 
of the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus, than can a 
shut eye take in the daylight, or a stopped ear 
the concord of sounds. But just as light may 
flood the atmosphere and gladden watching eyes, 
though the sun be hidden; so did the light of 
the great Atonement gladden all waking hearts 
in the old time, before its form was visible in 
our world. 

I regard, then, the offering of sacrifice by the 
Jewish worshipper as a spiritual act. If I am 
to regard it as a formal act, the mind of the 
man having nothing to do with it, I should find ' 
it impossible to disentangle the confusion into 
which such a view would plunge the whole 
counsel of God. The act, to have been worth 
anything, must have been spiritual ; that is, 
must have exercised the spiritual faculties of the 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 251 

worshipper by whom, or on behalf of whom, the 
sacrifice was offered. 

The connection of the atonement for sin with 
the life of a victim, had most important teach- 
ings, as we more fully understand. All that was 
meant by that, they only can comprehend who 
have seen " the Lamb of God, who beareth away 
the sins of the world." But to the thoughtful 
Jew there would be much solemn suggestion in 
the institution. The blood is the life : life is 
sacred — the life even of the meanest creature — 
and life is offered. Sin, then, touches the life ; 
it tinctures the very blood : by the shedding of 
blood only can it be purged away. The sign 
can only be fully understood when the thing 
signified appears. The types were dim, till that 
which they mutely prophesied was revealed. 
Then, and not till then, was it understood,— 
though the awful form of some of the pagan 
sacrifices shows terribly that the blood of bulls 
and of goats brings no real release to man — that 
the true atonement cannot be a life which God 
can claim, a creature life, but a life which God 
can offer — Himself. Some dim glimpse of this 
thought would be caught by the more earnest 
worshippers under the law, but to many it would 
be quite veiled, as is the depth of Gospel truth 
to many believers now. But this truth about 



252 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

sin was really, however dimly, expressed to and 
by the worshipper, whenever the high-priest 
passed with the blood 1 of atonement before the 
mercy-seat, and proclaimed to Israel the Lord's 
passover of sin. 

And the Jew was specially taught to connect 
his forgiveness, not with a basis which he could 
improvise, which he could either invent or create; 
but with a work which was God's ordinance, 
which was God's appointed way of access to 
Himself. It was by God's way, and not by his 
own, that the Jew sought to be justified ; and 
this renunciation of his own way and acceptance 
of God's, was an act of obedience essentially 
spiritual. What if it appeared to lead him but 
into the outer court of the tabernacle ? the spirit 
which led him thither was that same spirit 
of faith, by which, when the way to the inner 
court, the Holy of Holies, was laid open by the 
blood of Christ, he would enter with reverent 
boldness, and bow with open face before the 
throne. 

Here, then, are two fundamental principles of 
God's universal way of reconciling sinners to 
Himself, unfolded to Judaism by the Divine 
testimonies ; principles which are meaningless 
utterly, delusions, mockeries, snares to souls, if 
there be no great propitiation, whose work of 



THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 253 

atonement was at length in full measure to be 
revealed to the world. Thus it appears that the 
milk of the children contained all the essential 
principles of the nutriment, which was to feed 
the intelligent manhood of mankind. 

3. The third lesson of the symbol, perhaps 
the highest, is to be gathered from the contem- 
plation of its unity. 

We have considered it in its parts, but- it is 
essentially one. An ark, with a mercy-seat above 
it, the cherubim shadowing both, and the Divine 
glory, the light which was the sign of God's per- 
sonal presence, bathing the whole. 

I have spoken of the truth which is thus set 
forth, at large, in my discourse on law. It tells 
us that mercy only crowns us fully with its bene- 
diction, where the Divine testimonies are hidden 
within the heart. Man is the true Shekinah. 
The glory shines from him when the Word is 
enshrined within him. " Christ is the end of 
the law for righteousness to every one that 
believeth." In Him it is no law of words 
addressed sternly to the understanding, but a 
law of life shrined lovingly within the soul. We 
talk of the abolition of the legal dispensation, 
but, as I have said, there is but one way of 
abolishing the law — hiding it within the heart. 
Abolish it there, and thus : " Sin shall not have 



254 THE GOSPEL UNDER THE LAW. 

dominion over you, for ye are not under the law 
but under grace." 

There were Christians in the apostolic age, as 
there are in all ages, who thought that it was 
abolished otherwise ; to whom Gospel liberty was 
the proclaimed saturnalia of sin. How terribly 
does the apostle warn such, that through Christ 
they were more absolutely bound to God's law 
than ever : " Not without law to God, but under 
the law to Christ." And if any one wishes to 
know what that includes within its range, let him 
read it here, Col. hi. 5-17. And let him learn 
that to have within the heart such delight in 
the testimonies of God, that His statutes become 
our songs in the house of our pilgrimage, was 
in old time, is now, and shall be through eternity, 
life, liberty, glory, and bliss. 



ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 255 



Alone : yet not alone. 

" And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I wilt give 
thee rest." — Exod. xxxiii. 14. 

These are the words of God's assurance, in 
answer to an almost agonizing supplication of 
Moses, "Except thy presence, my God, go with 
me, carry us not up hence." The prayer was 
uttered on the edge of the great wilderness, 
when he was about to loose his hold on his last 
familiar resting-place, and commit himself and 
his people to its unknown wilds. All the magni- 
tude of his grand undertaking was pressing on 
him at that moment. " Who is sufficient for 
these things," he cried, like one who, after the 
lapse of ages — a pilgrim of Sinai, too — set his 
hand to the conversion of a world. And the 
prayer is a high exemplar for us. The Divine 
guidance was the one question which to them, 
to us, is absolutely a question of life or death. 
Thus far the ground over which they had passed 
was familiar marching-ground to their great 
leader. Moreover, their march had been a tri- 



256 ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 

umphal exodus from bondage. Up to Sinai, 
Egypt was behind them, and they had the joyous 
sense that they were escaping from hated and 
tyrannous foes. From Sinai, Canaan was before 
them, and the grand difficulties and perils of 
their enterprise began. It was the great critical 
point of their course. Yerily they had need of 
a vision of a Divine leader, whose pillar of flame 
should shine, not on their march only, but in 
their hearts. I have said already that Moses 
was the Man of Israel, the man in whom all 
the higher life and aim of the whole community 
expressed itself. We study Israel through him ; 
and I am persuaded that we shall get nearer 
to the heart of this great matter — the Lord's 
guidance of the host — if we listen to his wrestling- 
supplication, in which the intercessor was utter- 
ing the cry of a whole people, and catch the words 
of the answer of God, than if we were to study, 
as we might, the external form of the guiding 
angel, marvellous, miraculous, and richly sym- 
bolic as it unquestionably is. " And the Lord 
went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to 
lead them in the way ; and by night in a pillar 
of fire to give them light; to go by day and 
night. He took not away the pillar of cloud 
by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from 
before the people." A grand, sublime, symbol — 



ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 257 

amongst the greatest things in history. What a 
picture is this ! " And on the day that the taber- 
nacle was reared up the cloud covered the taber- 
nacle, namely, the tent of the testimony : and at 
even there was upon the tabernacle as it were 
the appearance of fire, until the morning. So it 
was alway : the cloud covered it by day, and the 
appearance of fire by night. And when the cloud 
was taken up from the tabernacle, then after that 
the children of Israel journeyed : and in the place 
where the cloud abode, there the children of Israel 
pitched their tents. At the commandment of the 
Lord the children of Israel journeyed, and at the 
commandment of the Lord they pitched : as long 
as the cloud abode upon the tabernacle they 
rested in their tents." — Numb. ix. 15-18. 

Imagine that mighty host winding through the 
dreary paths of the desert, lonely there as a 
people among peoples, as their Lord became 
lonely as a man among men ; cut off utterly from 
all national associations and sympathies ; the 
strongest people in the world behind them, ani- 
mated by the most deadly hatred, and powerful 
nations in front, armed to receive them, and to 
dispute with them every inch of the inheritance 
they were resolved to win ; marching on along 
those solemn desert pathways, with the visible 
sign in the midst of them of the presence in 
h- 17 



258 alone: yet not alone. 

person of the Lord God of the whole world. 
There, under the blazing rays of the burning noon, 
a soft cloud spread its cool shadow on the weary 
plain, and refreshed imagination at any rate — and 
what pure refreshment that is — with the picture 
of the shadowing love of the Lord God Almighty 
over the whole wearying pilgrimage and battle 
march of life ! And then, as evening fell, and 
the glooms of night began to drop their awful 
shroud — for nightfall is awful in the lonely waste 
— over the weird forms and hues of those beetling 
cliffs, or the gaunt outlines of the desert palms, 
the cloud began to glow and lighten, till it cast a 
broad flood of living lustre, such as we see on 
earth only in dreams, on the whole scene of the 
desert encampment. It touched the spurs and 
peaks of the mountains, till they stood glowing 
like angel sentinels around the camp of God's 
redeemed, and filled the night watchers — and let 
us be sure that there were a multitude, and not the 
least earnest-hearted of the people — with some 
vision of what might be seen, if, as at Elisha's 
prayer, the veils were lifted, and all the heavenly 
armies appeared attending the path of God's 
host through battles and perils, through foaming 
seas and dreary deserts, to their glorious rest. 
But magnificent as was the sign, the thing signi- 
fied transcended it. In vain had the Divine 



alone: yet not alone. 259 

presence been shewn to them in that miraculous 
cloud and glory, if there had been no inner sense 
of the Divine presence in their hearts. It is in the 
communion between Moses and the Divine Leader 
of the host, that we are admitted into the true 
sanctuary of that people's strength. Just so far 
as their spirits went with Moses in this prayer, in 
this yearning for the inner presence and guidance 
of God, did they march joyously and triumphantly 
on their way ; and when that failed, the visible cloud 
of splendour helped them no longer ; they dropped 
like blighted fruit from the living tree, and their 
carcases fell in the wilderness. So we will enter 
with Moses within the cloud that sweeps round 
Sinai, and consider our sources of strength and 
guidance for the pilgrimage of life. 

Remember that Moses was about to quit the 
familiar ground, the old home of his exile, the 
mountain region of Horeb. The path onward 
lay through unknown deserts, and would most 
surely be beset by daring and experienced foes. 
It was a prospect before which even a soul of such 
heroic mould might faint. Would God go with 
him, not in a pillar of cloud, as the national 
leader, but as friend, companion, comrade of 
his spirit ? Let him have that promise, and he 
would bravely on. But well he knew that the 
loftiest sphere, unlit by God's presence, is but a 

17—2 



260 ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 

sunless world ; that a life of the grandest orbit, 
unquickened by His smile, is joyless, barren, un- 
blessing and unblessed. We moan sometimes, 
or maunder, over the uncongenial scenes into 
which duty leads us, the distasteful tasks to which 
we seem to be yoked by the will of God. When 
you next make your moan, try to realize that man's 
life. Scholar, statesman, profound and accom- 
plished thinker, used to mix as a master in the 
foremost circle of the foremost society of the world 
in his day, God had cast his lonely lot amongst 
a people utterly uninstructed and unintelligent, 
unable to understand, indisposed to reverence his 
thoughts, and ever breaking in on the meditations 
and communings on which the fate of unborn 
ages was hanging, with their sensual outcries, 
"Hast thou brought out this whole nation into 
the wilderness, that it may perish with hunger ?" 
A man, moreover, who had deeper thoughts about 
the Divine nature and character than any other 
man of his day ; to whom the meaning of life and 
the sacredness of duty were more plain. For, 
had he not entered into the inner court of the 
Divine presence, and gazed on the glory which no 
eye but his had prevailed to look upon, and talked 
with God face to face, as a man talketh with his 
friend ? And see him there, among a people who 
clung to the outer court, for it was less dreadful 



alone: yet not alone. 261 

than the inner; who had no conception of the 
solemnity of a Divine command, except when it 
Yv T as enforced by plagues, and who assailed him, 
when he came forth from this Divine communion, 
with the very glory on his countenance, full of 
that " favour" which is the life of men and peoples, 
with scornful questions about graves ! Never, 
perhaps, w T as man so lonely. Not Elijah, when 
he flung himself in fierce wrath on the floor of the 
cave of Horeb, and the very ravens rebuked his 
despair; not Paul, when he stood, aged and 
friendless, before the bloody tribunal of pagan 
empire ; not Alfred, when alone in the neat-herd's 
hut, that winter when, in Asser's simple words, 
" he lived an unquiet life in the woodlands of 
Somerset," and the destinies of England rested in 
his single hand ; not Columbus, with the weary 
waste of waters still round him, and the land 
which God had called that pious and patient 
captain to discover, still far away : none of them, 
perhaps, ever felt so utterly lonely as Moses at 
that moment ; and yet not alone— not alone — for 
God was with him. Servants of duty, pilgrims of 
discipline ! others, greater than you, have passed 
through it all before you ; others have laid on that 
altar a sacrifice which you cannot mate ; others, 
the world's elect spirits, have accepted this word 
of the Eternal — " My presence shall go with thee, 



262 alone: yet not alone. 

and I will give thee rest," as the mariner accepts 
the pole-star, as the world accepts the sunlight, as 
an army accepts a renowned leader, as an age 
sick of revolution accepts its king. 

I cannot see that this choice of Moses, to walk 
in God's way, if but assured of (rod's presence, 
differs in anywise from the choice which that 
people was called on to make at that moment, 
and which God is ever pressing upon us all. In 
considering it in its broad human aspect, I 
observe — 

I. Here are two ways on which the choice is 
to be exercised — two paths, which very plainly 
diverge. 

It is the old, old choice — worldliness, godli- 
ness — duty, pleasure — God's will, self-will — the 
passions and appetites of the flesh or of the 
mind, the convictions of conscience and the 
word of God. We may fence with these ques- 
tions concerning right, truth, and duty; but 
every man in his secret soul knows full well what 
they mean. And there come great crises in the 
history of our lives in which the two ways lie very 
plainly before us, and when, by our own delibe- 
rate election of the one or the other, our life- 
course gets shaped, and our eternity. It was 
such a crisis in the history of Israel. They stood 
there before God an independent nation, capable 



alone: yet not alone. 263 

of national action and national choice. No longer 
slaves, driven in gangs by a taskmaster's lash, but 
conscious freemen, with all the dignity and all the 
burden of the freeman's lot upon them, they stood 
there in the heart of the great wilderness, through 
which lay the path to beautiful and wealthy lands. 
Straight over the desert a Divine guide pointed 
their way. He had hidden from them nothing of 
the toils, perils, battles, famines of their pil- 
grimage; there, before the Mount of God, He had 
unveiled to them Himself, themselves, and their 
future. They had had a full taste of what a 
desert life must be, as they journeyed thither, and 
He gave them no hope that it could be otherwise 
to the close, — as He passed the word of command 
once more through their host, " set forward." On 
the other hand, in soft contrast to this stern and 
awful desert, lay Egypt, swimming in the sun- 
light ; her wanton beauty and lavish plenty wooed 
them eagerly to return. Unholy passions and 
longings, never so fierce as when they tremble for 
their sway, flashed up to frenzy ; and the old cry, 
" Better, far better, slavery with food and plea- 
sure, than liberty with God and death," trembled 
on their lips. Here were the two paths : Divine 
duty, with privation and suffering ; worldly plea- 
sure, with bondage and degradation : the one, on 
through the wilderness to Canaan ; the other, 



264 alone: yet not alone. 

back, one step, one brief step, to Egyptian bon- 
dage and night. They went on, but half-hearted. 
Moses alone went on believing; they, compelled 
by an overmastering awe ; their hearts went back 
to Egypt, and in the desert, not in Canaan, they 
found their graves. 

And now let me show forth the same history 
in yourselves. These Jews are our exemplars ; 
God wrote this page of their history for us. To 
every man who has a soul to be saved or damned 
God opens at some time,, in some way, the ques- 
tion of duty and life, or pleasure and death. 
And it is often after this fashion : He takes you, 
by some striking visitation or overpowering 
influence, a step out of the Egypt of your daily 
natural bondage; shows to you the wilderness, 
tells you of Canaan, and whispers the assurance, 
"My presence shall go with thee, I will give 
thee rest." I cannot analyse your experience. 
I state the matter broadly. In some way, at 
some time — and it is now in the broad daylight 
of memory — God makes you hear His vocation, 
and asks for the possession of your hearts. It 
may have been by some preacher, who seemed 
that day to speak with the power and truth of an 
angel to your spirits ; it may have been by some 
stroke which shattered your idols round you, and 
bowed you down mute before the footstool of 



ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 265 

your King ; it may have been by the lips of some 
dying saint, or by the holy and beautiful life of one 
who has gone to walk in white before the Lamb. 
I know not, but God knows, and you know. 
For the time, a strange change came over all your 
feelings, thoughts, and hopes. God took you out 
one step from the drudgery, the circle of slavish 
tasks, the reeking flesh-pots, and the tyrant's 
lash ; out into the clear air, the bright heaven, 
the free earth of the wilderness — and what was 
the world to you then ? what the wealth of 
Croesus, the throne of Caesar ? Another world 
enveloped you with its atmosphere, and ravished 
you with its music — a world where Croesus is a 
beggar, and Nero a slave. You caught some 
gleaming of its splendour, some echoes of its 
choral hymns. You learnt there, that all God's 
universe is not as dark as the sin-begotten gloom 
of this world ; that all man's being is not earthly ; 
that all man's life need not be consuming and 
degrading toil ; that there is a world open to him 
in which the longings of his spirit — that aspira- 
tion which kills the pleasures of sin, though it 
wins not the joys of virtue — can find free play 
and progress, and, gaining power from Christ to 
master flesh and world, make the very air around 
him musical with loud hosannas and shouts of 
victory ; a world in whose sphere, though sense 



266 ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 

may pine, spirit rejoices; though gold may waste, 
riches grow; though the outer man with its 
infirm purposes and vain passions may perish, 
the inner man is renewed daily, stands up in 
freedom, rejoices in discipline, and exults in hope 
of the glory of God. 

All this, at such moments — and to all at some 
time is the vision sent — God shows to us ; and 
He calls us to make our final election ; to go on 
with His pillar of cloud and flame through the 
desert, conscious freemen, or if the flesh-pots are 
too sweet, to go back to Egypt, conscious slaves. 
Thus God calls you, claims you, stirs you up to 
the great enterprise of life ; and I dare not mock 
Him by supposing that He does not wish or 
mean you to go on. But then, just as you are 
realizing the truth of these impressions, the 
majesty of eternal things, and the glory of 
spiritual conquest, and are about to commit 
yourself to the Divine hand, you bethink your- 
self — the devil takes care that you shall not 
forget it — of the sacrifice it demands, the dangers, 
wanderings, and difficulties which it will entail, 
the dear associations from which it will sever 
you, the loved companions it vail compel you to 
forsake; you look on, the drear, dread desert 
sweeps out before you, you hear the night wind 
moan through its desolate wastes ; you know 



ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 267 

that its farther bounds are thronged by foe- 
nien armed for your destruction ; you ask, how 
many in fulfilling the will of God have found not 
kingdoms, but graves, and forgetting for the 
moment that the bosom of Jesus is their sleeping- 
bed, you let the sensual cry break forth once 
more, " It is better for us to serve the Egyptians 
than that we should die here in the wilderness." 
The cry of the spirit is choked and silenced ; the 
choice is made. 

I do not ask you whether this be a chapter of 
your experience; I know it is. God has not 
formed each human spirit to be the heir of im- 
mortality, laid on it responsibilities of fearful 
moment, and sent it forth to a probation in which 
sin is the harbinger of death eternal, without 
coming to that soul, whose destiny He has so 
fearfully interwoven with its duty, to talk to it of 
duty, to urge it to action, to kindle its aspira- 
tions for freedom, life, and glory, ere He leaves 
it to its carnal, earthly passions, to bury it in 
eternal night. 

" Jerusalem ! Jerusalem ! thou that killest 
the prophets, and stonest them which are sent 
unto thee ; how often would I have gathered thy 
children together, even as a hen gathereth her 
chickens under her wings, but ye would not ! " 
is Christ's lament over every self-immolated soul. 



268 ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 



II. The cry of the human spirit for rest. 

The longing of man's spirit amid all these 
strifes, discords, and confusions, is for rest. We 
are made for rest, and have a right to cry for it, 
if we do but understand what it really means. 
Nothing can eradicate man's conviction that strife 
and discord have no right in the universe ; that 
they are abnormal : that the normal condition of 
things and beings is harmony, and that harmony 
is the music of rest. God must rest — rest even 
in working ; and all that is of God and from 
God, has the longing and the tending to rest. 
I believe that some dull notion that they will 
have more rest in the life of the world, that they 
will escape many cares and distractions, and, at 
any rate, be at peace in sin, lies at the bottom of 
many a backsliding to Egypt in human hearts. 
No man at first is content to let the question 
alone — to leave the riddle of life unread. The 
inward and the outward carry on the conflict, 
and refuse to settle it on the cheap terms of sin. 
Hence arises the long discord in him who has 
not found the principle of the Divine harmony : 
' 'the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the 
spirit striveth against the flesh, and the two are 
contrary the one to the other." We long to find 
some truth which shall release us from the agony, 
and make some kind of harmony in our lives. 



ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 269 

We find this battle of life inexplicable ; it some- 
times shakes our faith in the wisdom and good- 
ness of our God. We shout into the Sibyl cave 
and listen for the responses ; we take the whis- 
pers of sense for the answer, and then we go on 
our way. But the conflict again begins, the 
perplexities again return ; again and again we 
cry, each time in a more frenzied mood, "Who 
will show us any good ? " " Who will give us 
rest ? " Now, to find peace, we are willing to 
abandon the world for God, for Christ, for a holy 
life, and the rest of heaven. But then the 
magnitude of the sacrifice appals us ; we fall 
back again, and take to shouting, " Peace, peace !" 
where there is no peace, instead. At times, in 
the full flood of the reaction, we blasphemously 
pray that the Spirit may be withdrawn, that the 
Light may be quenched: "What have we to do 
with thee, Jesus, thou son of God ; why art thou 
come to torment us before our time ? " 

We search passionately after a true philosophy 
of life ; we ask to understand the reason of this 
conflict, and to see on to its end. Is there no 
truth which can cast light for us over these 
troubled waters, and show us, though from afar, 
that all is not rough and dangerous — that beyond 
them is a calm ocean, a Pacific unswept by 
storms, and studded with the peaceful islands 



270 ALONE I YET NOT ALONE. 

of the blessed. Or is all to be darkness, and for 
ever ? Are we to wrestle all night with the 
moaning surge, until morning casts us shattered 
on the strand of eternity? Tell us why these 
storms are raging ; why only through that deep 
dark sea and howling wilderness lies the path to 
the better land. Above all, show us a light 
which can guide us through the glooms and lead 
us into rest. 

Listen : there is such a word of guidance, and 
but one. Amid all the storms which duty calls 
you to brave, all the sacrifices that God calls 
you to make, the perils, pains, and battles 
through which your heavenward path may lead 
you, voices come down, calm and clear, from 
those who have fought and suffered, and are at 
rest with Christ, — 

Mortal, they softly say, 

Peace to tliy heart : 
We too, yes ! mortal, 

Have been as thou art ; 
Hope-lifted, doubt-depressed, 

Seeing in part ; 
Tried, troubled, tempted, 

Sustained as thou art. 

While, above all the voices of the creature, from 
the midst of the glow of glory which surrounds 
the throne, the word of the Son of God, the 



ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 271 

great Captain of the human host, comes down to 
every earnest, struggling spirit : " My presence 

SHALL GO WITH THEE, I WILL GIVE THEE REST." 

We pass on, to complete the subject, by con- 
sidering — 

III. The Divine assurance, which was to Moses, 
and should be to us, an all-sufficient warrant to 
leave the world and the pleasures of sin, and 
commit ourselves to the desert under God's 
guidance, as the path to the heavenly rest. 

" He endured as seeing Him who is invisible." 
Such only can endure. We have talked hitherto 
of the two lives, the two paths, mainly in their 
present aspects, as they seem to man, not as they 
are before the eye of God. We have spoken of 
sacrifices, struggles, and sufferings; of earth, to 
the child of God, as a wilderness, and life as a 
long and weary night. Now let us lift our eyes 
and see with what stars of God this night is 
illumined, what arms of Divine love enfold the 
pilgrim, what heavenly voices, amid the storms of 
life's wild sea, the surgings of passion, and even 
the wreck of our sensual existence, can hush the 
pilgrim to rest. " My presence shall go with 
thee." Now there arises a light in the darkness. 
There is compensation, yea, infinitely more, 
something for which earth has no name, " a far 
more exceeding, even an eternal weight of 



272 ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 

glory." Not by striking out pains and strifes, 
but by crowding in conquests, joys, and glories, 
do we set our fraction of life square with the 
measures of the Eternal. " For the joy that was 
set before Him, he endured the cross, and despised 
the shame." He is the ensample unto us. With 
all that we have pictured of the aspects of the 
wilderness, there is a Divine presence with the 
soul, which is its joy, its strength, its life, its 
heaven — yes, even on earth its heaven. " The 
best of all is, God is with us." 

I shall speak briefly of the reality of this Divine 
presence, and its fruits. 

1. Its reality. 

We can come nearer to the heart of this great 
matter than even Moses can lead us. " Jesus 
answered them, do ye now believe ? Behold the 
hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be 
scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave 
me alone ; and yet I am not alone, because 
the Fatheb is with me. These things have 
I spoken unto you that in me ye might have 
peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation : 
but be of good cheer: I have overcome the 
world." John xvi. 31-33. 

Let me ask you to study, in the light of this 
train of thought, this passage of our Lord's 
history — John xviii. 28 — xix. 12. 



ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 273 

Is this the strongest reality or the deepest 
delusion known to man ? It is one or the other. 
We are here in the presence of an awful fact, or 
a more awful lie. You may use fine words about 
" the Divine idea," " the higher self-consciousness 
of Jesus," "the subjective reality of a Divine 
presence with him there;" but I confess that all 
such talk seems to me blank blasphemy when 
intruded into such scenes as these. Either there 
was One, above the world, who was with the Lord 
in that hour, whose word represented to Him all 
truth, whose touch represented to Him all 
power, whose ministries represented to Him all 
love ; or the arch -delusion triumphed in that 
hour, and for ever, over man. He who stood 
there unarmed and friendless before Pilate, had 
One to stand by Him, in whom all power, wisdom, 
truth, and life were centred. The roots of the 
witness to the truth which the Lord then bore, 
were deeper than the everlasting mountains, 
deeper than heaven, deeper than hell ; they were 
firm in the Being of the Living God. 

I have no other key to this awful transaction. 
If the Lord mistook His own idea for that Living 
God, and gave an " objective" reality to what 
was but the phantom of a longing and aching 
heart, then there is no reality anywhere around 
us or above us; nothing to justify, purify, and 

18 



274 ALONE : YET NOT ALOXE. 

lift us out of ourselves. He who is enamoured of 
or content with himself may find this a gospel ; 
but for me, if there be no living God my Saviour, 
to redeem me from myself, to inform me with His 
truth, and inspire me with His life, why then, 
" Let us eat, and drink — and die, and let it be 
soon." No ! the one real thing in this universe 
is God's presence with the human spirit ; having 
that we have all things, missing that we lack all 
things ; all things collapse, and vanish like a 
dream away. 

Think you that he did not find it a rock, who 
stood up before kings and an angry world, and 
said, " This is God's word. I can speak no 
other. Here stand I, God help me." What to 
him were kings and popes and hostile armies ? 
What, as he said himself, all the devils in hell ? 
And what did they do to harm him ! He finished 
his course with joy, he died peacefully in his bed, 
a conqueror, and filled the world with his immortal 
fame. And I would rather see the weakest and 
most trembling being that I loved, in the right 
path, following Christ through tribulations, than 
lapped in ease and worldly indulgence, and lulled 
by soft strains to voluptuous repose. And why ? 
Because I believe that all blessing is compre- 
hended in the promise, " My presence shall go 
with thee, and I will give thee rest." Pray for 



alone: yet not alone. 275 

this, for your children and for your clearest : give 
God no rest till He has promised to guide them, 
and then leave them in His hand for life and for 
eternity. 

Let God appear, and light rises on the troubled 
pilgrimage with soft healing wings. The dark 
drear night flushes with auroral splendour, herald 
of the celestial dawn. In the fiercest fires that 
man can kindle, a grand and godlike form is by 
the martyrs, and the tyrant world shudders as it 
sees that the flame touches nothing but their 
bonds. The Captain of the Lord's host is ever at 
the right hand of the child of duty, covering him 
with his shield in all deadly perils, and in sorrows 
drawing him closer to his heart. And moments 
there will be, when the moaning surges of the 
stormy life -sea around him are silenced, and he 
hears with strange joy and wonder the calm but 
mighty heavings of that eternal ocean, which 
bears the rushing tides of being back to their great 
fountain, God. 

2. The fruits. " I will give thee rest." 
I have already said that the longing of the 
human spirit amid all this is for rest. There are 
two kinds of rest, or rather what goes by the 
name of rest, within reach of man. The secret 
of the one is, escape from trouble ; the secret of 
the other is, entering into life. Life is the harino- 

18—2 



276 alone: yet not alone. 

nious balance of conflicting forces, the cairn con- 
trol of all opposite powers. Escape frorn trouble 
is not permitted to man, though he thinks it is. 
" This same shall comfort us concerning our 
work and toil of our hands, because of the ground 
which the Lord hath cursed," said Lamech, 
on the eve of the deluge. Even thus saith the 
worldling, " Peace, peace," while "there is no 
peace, saith my God, to the wicked." It is a won- 
derful feature in man's constitution that he can 
find rest only in his highest, in the full culture 
and activity of all his powers. He tries to rest in 
a luxurious home, in a feverish orgy, on a wanton's 
breast. But who shall paint the anguish of the 
rest of the wicked ? How many a man has gone 
out from a scene of uproarious merriment, to 
blow out his brains, in blank despair ! There is 
no rest but in God. Man rests only in the ful- 
ness of his existence, in the completeness of his 
life. Moses found no rest in communion with 
earthly natures, but there was rest for him — it 
bathed his soul like the dewy moonlight the 
flowers — when he entered into that which is within 
the veil, and talked " of things unspeakable" with 
God. " Brethren, they which believe do enter 
into rest." Having faith in the blood of atone- 
ment, in the God and Father reconciled in Christ 
Jesus, the conscience rests in the sense of recon- 



ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 277 

ciliation. Having faith in the Saviour's power 
and love, the spirit rests amid the severities of 
discipline, yea sleeps sometimes, as Jesus did 
while the storm was highest ; for ever when the 
danger is imminent, and the foaming surges are 
parting to engulf their prey, the Divine presence 
within shines forth around, and immediately there 
is a great calm, and the spirit rests still. " And 
I heard a voice from heaven saying, Blessed are 
the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth : 
yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from 
their labours; and their works do follow 
them." 

To that world we must carry on our gaze, if 
we would see the issues of the divergent paths, 
whose various courses on earth we have attempted 
to scan. The believer, he who " endures as 
seeing the invisible," is led by the Divine angel, 
the angel of the presence of God, through a storm 
of conflicts to a glorious rest. The lover of 
pleasure is led by his angel, the angel whose pre- 
sence he loves, through the sensual joys which 
are but the painted mask of the inward miseries, 
to the outer darkness, " where the worm dieth 
not, and their fire is not quenched for ever." In 
life the believer has the assurance, " My presence 
shall go with thee, I will give thee rest;" in 
death, " Yea, though I walk through the valley 



278 ALONE : YET NOT ALONE. 

of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for 
Thou art with me, Thy rod and staff, they com- 
fort me." " As for me, I shall hehold Thy face 
in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I 
awake, with Thy likeness." 

Then, haying done the will of God, he rests in 
the bosom of Jesus, midst the unveiled splendours 
of the Eternal Light, and the full outfiowings of 
the Infinite Love, until the trumpet of the arch- 
angel summons him to exchange that rest for 
glory. And then, what eye hath not seen, what 
ear hath not heard, shall be disclosed in that 
last great day of God ; when the redeemed spirit, 
fresh from the rest of Paradise, shall put on the 
radiant form, immortal as itself, and know all 
that the Divine love, which saved the helpless 
sinner, can show to the glorified son, through all 
the ages of eternity. 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 279 



>4pjm so. 

Kibroth-hattaavah : the Graves of Lust. 

" And there icent forth a wind from the Lord, and brought 
quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, as it were a 
days journey on this side, and as it were a days journey on the 
other side, round about the camp, and as it were two cubits high 
upon the face of the earth. And the people stood up all that 
day, and cdl that night, and all the next day, and they gathered 
the quails : he that gathered least gathered ten homers : and they 
spread them all abroad for themselves round about the camp. 
And while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it was chewed, 
the wrath of the Lord teas kindled against the people, and the 
Lord smote the people with a very great plague. And he called 
the name of that place Kibroth-hattaavah : because there they 
buried the people that lusted.'" — Numb. xi. 31-34. 

The eleventh chapter in the Book of Numbers is 
one of the gravest and saddest in history. The 
tenth chapter shows to us the people developed 
into a nation and a church, before the face of the 
Lord in Sinai. They set forth, with a grand order- 
liness and courage, on their Canaanward march; I 
call it grand, for the root of it was in heaven, with 
God. The tumultuous throng had found its relation 
to God, and understood, through Him, itself and its 



280 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH : » 

vocation. Full of a new dignity and bravery, full 
of a high sense of the sacredness of its mission, 
it marshalled itself as an army, and marched 
on to victory. Doubtless the people felt, in their 
intense and lofty emotion, that the follies and 
lusts which had erst defiled and dishonoured them, 
were done with for ever. Which of us has not 
felt it, and been disenchanted, perhaps that very 
day, in bitterness of soul ? They would have a 
brief march, a sharp conflict, a swift conquest, a 
glorious possession of their promised land. But, 
alas ! quite another future was before them : aspi- 
ration is not achievement, hope is not endurance. 
But two of that mighty army ever trod the sacred 
ground. 

It seems that they had a " mixed multitude" 
among them. "And a mixed multitude went up 
with them" Exod. xii. 88. There is sure to be 
trouble with that mixed multitude. These con- 
cessions through indifference, weakness, or mere 
softness of heart, rarely fail to breed mischief in 
companies and souls. They are the alloys in 
the pure metal of life, and, like the tin in the 
silver, make it brittle and apt to flaw. They were 
pleased, perhaps proud, to take a great company 
with them. Lovers, mistresses, servants ; all 
bound to them by some tie, but not that tie which 
bound them to God and to each other, their 



THE GKAVES OF LUST. 281 

calling to the promised land. That which we 
tolerate in the coasts of our homes and hearts, 
too good to expel, too bad to assimilate, and 
which we suffer therefore to lodge with us, rarely 
fails to make havoc in our lives. 

I think it probable that this mixed multitude 
felt that there was something unsatisfactory in 
their position, after the organization of the nation 
before Sinai. The children of Israel marched 
thenceforth by tribes under their banners, arrayed 
in a grand order around the shrine of the national 
faith; while the mixed multitude struggled on as 
they could in their tracks. Be that as it may, 
they fell a lusting, the host caught the infection, 
and there fell a multitude before the fire of the 
Lord, ere the murmuring and lusting were stayed. 
Then follows an intercession of Moses with God, 
or rather let us call it a remonstrance, so bold 
and outspoken that we hear it with awe ; but so 
honest, so simple-hearted, so full of a thorough 
willingness to bear the burden if there was no 
help for it, as to draw forth from the Lord a 
compassionate and sympathetic answer. Then 
follows the communication of the spirit of wisdom 
and guidance to the seventy elders, the Pente- 
costal baptism of the Old Testament dispensation ; 
then the prophesying of Eldad and Medad in the 
camp, whereat the bold young spirits, jealous for 



282 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH. 

official dignity, were indignant ; but the wise and 
careworn elder, eager for help from any quarter, 
nor thinking that a single man or order can con- 
tain a blessing large enough for a nation or a 
world, was glad. And then came flights of quails 
from the sea, and fell in showers around the camp, 
juicy and nourishing meat, meat by acres ; that 
they might know how little the Lord's arm was 
shortened, how little His store was spent when it 
pleased Him to open His hand and give. The 
rest our text reveals: i( And while the flesh was 
yet between their teeth, ere it ivas chewed, the wrath 
of the Lord ivas kindled against the people, and the 
Lord smote the people with a very great plague. 
And he called the name of that place Kibroth- 
liattaavah ; because there they buried the people that 

lusted" KlBEOTH-HATTAAVAH ; THE GEAVES OF 
LUST. 

Nov/, this is a most rich chapter of human 
history. We will stand by those graves, and listen 
to their teachings ; they may save us from stand- 
ing by the graves of the idols of our own hearts. 

I shall endeavour to illustrate this subject by 
dwelling on three principles : — 

I. There are perpetual resurrections of easily 
besetting sins. 

II. The time comes, in the history of the indul- 
gence of besetting sins, when God ceases to strive 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 283 

for us against them, and lets them haye their 
way. 

III. The end of that way is inevitably and 
speedily a grave. 

I. The perpatual resurrections of easily beset- 
ting sins. 

This lusting was no novelty in their experience ; 
it was the besetting temptation of the desert, and 
the besetting sin of their hearts. But they ought 
to have known. They ought to have viewed the 
first rising of its ghastly shape in their camps 
with horror; there were graves enough, in the 
path from Egypt, to remind them of its deadly 
work. God had been at great pains to teach 
them the lesson of dependence, that " man doth 
not live by bread alone, but by every word which 
proceedeth out of the mouth of God doth man 
live." 

" And when Pharaoh dreiv nigh, the children of 
Israel lifted up their eyes, and, behold, the Egyptians 
marched after them ; and they ivere sore afraid : and 
the children of Israel cried out unto the Lord. And 
they said unto Moses, Because there ivere no graves 
in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wil- 
derness } wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to 
carry us forth out of Egypt ? Is not this the ivord 
that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, 
that we may serve the Egyptians ? For it had been 



284 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH : 

better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that ice 
should die in the wilderness. And Moses said unto 
the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the sal- 
vation of the Lord, which He will show to you to-day: 
for the Egyptians whom ye have seen to-day, ye shall 
see them again no more for ever. The Lord shall 
fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace. And 
the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto 
me ? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go 
forward : but lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out 
thine hand over the sea, and divide it : and the 
children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the 
midst of the sea." Exod. xiv. 10-16. 

"And they took their journey from Elim, and all 
the congregation of the children of Israel came unto 
the wilderness of Sin, ichich is between Elim and 
Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after 
their departing out of the land of Egypt. And the 
whole congregation of the children of Israel mur- 
mured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness : 
And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to 
God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the 
land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh-pots, and 
ivhen we did eat bread to the full; for ye have 
brought us forth into this 'wilderness, to kill this 
whole assembly with hunger. Then said the Lord 
unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven 
for you ; and the people shall go out and gather a 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 285 

certain rate every clay, that I may prove them, whether 
they will walk in my law, or no. And it shall come 
to pass, that on the sixth clay they shall prepare that 
ivhich they bring in; and it shall be twice as much 
as they gather daily. 91 Exod. xvi. 1-5. 

" And all the congregation of the children of Israel 
journeyed from the wilderness of Sin, after their 
journeys, according to the commandment of the Lord, 
and pitched in Rephidim : and there was no water 
for the people to drink. Wherefore the people did 
chide with Moses, and said, Give us water that we 
may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide 
ye ivith me 1 wherefore do ye tempt the Lord ? And 
the people thirsted there for water; and the people 
murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this 
that thou hast brought us up out of Lgypt, to hill us 
and our children and our cattle with thirst? And 
Moses cried unto the Lord, saying, What shall I do 
unto this people 1 they be almost ready to stone me. 
And the Lord said unto Moses, Go on before tlie 
people, and take with thee of the elders of Israel ; 
and thy rod, ivhereivith thou smotest the river, take in 
thine hand and go. Behold, I will stand before thee 
there upon the rock in Horeb ; and thou shalt smite 
the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that 
the people may drink. And Moses did so in the 
sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the 
name of the place Massahy and Meribah, because of 



288 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH : 

the chiding of the children of Israel, and because 
they tempted the Lord, saying, Is the Lord among 
us, or notV Exod. xvii. 1-7. 

And now, with firmer assurance than ever that 
God was in the midst of them, to bring them 
into the place which He had prepared, they re- 
sumed their march through the unknown desert 
paths. The tabernacle, the ark, the order of the 
camp, the pillar of cloud and flame, were all 
among them, the pledge of His presence. But 
all in vain. They must have flesh, or they would 
give up the enterprise, and die in despair. And 
they had flesh; they were fed, were crammed 
with it to nauseation, and with it " (xod sent 
leanness into their souls." 

I dwell on two points of large importance for 
the understanding of this history. 

1. The side from which the temptation came 
to them. 

2. The special season at which they were 
assailed. 

1. The side from which it came. 

" And the mixed multitude that was among them 
fell a lusting : and the children of Israel also wept 
again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat f We 
remember the fish, which toe did eat in Egypt 
freely ; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, 
and the onions, and the garlich : But mm our 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 287 

soul is dried away : there is nothing at all, beside 
this manna, before our eyes." Numb. xi. 4-6. 

This mixed multitude corresponds precisely to 
the troop of disorderly passions and appetites, 
with which we suffer ourselves to march through 
the desert of life. Passions, desires, ever mad 
for indulgence, and reckless, scornful, of Divine 
law. The mixed multitude was but loosely 
attached to them. They had no call, no ancient 
traditions, no national hopes, no right to call 
Canaan a home. They might have won all these. 
Judaism was ever benignant to the stranger. 
God's elections are ever inclusive and not exclu- 
sive; but the title was not to be won hj lust. 
They were a loose, coarse, common company, 
with nothing to dignify, elevate, inspire. # No 
wonder they fainted, murmured, lusted ; and 
thought flesh for to-day was better than Canaan 
to-moiTow, and heaven beyond. They had come 
into the wilderness with the people, perhaps 
to escape from bitter bondage, perhaps to make 
what they could out of the people's necessi- 
ties in the desert; the camp-followers of the 
great army, greedy, vicious, disorderly, and liable 
to all sorts of senseless panics, which not seldom 

* It is noteworthy, that the strangers, after the long com- 
mon experience and discipline of the wilderness, are spoken of 
in much higher terms, as " the strangers that were conversant 
among them." — Josh. viii. 35. 



288 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH I 

imperil the whole host. I say, again, there 
was no ban upon them, because they were not of 
the heirs of promise ; a nobler sympathy with a 
great people's destiny had won them a nobler 
place in history. There was one once, one of a 
mixed multitude, " a Syrophcenician woman," 
who would take no denial. Even " It is not meet 
to take the children's bread and cast it unto the 
dogs," would not drive her away. "Yea, Lord, 
yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from 
the master's table," was her faithful response. 
The word, " woman, great is thy faith, be it 
unto thee even as thou wilt !•" received her into 
the elect circle of those who had power with 
God and with man to prevail. 

But this mixed multitude was of another sort, 
an ignoble rabble, to whom uncleanness was 
native, like the disorderly rout we lead about 
with us through life's pilgrimage ; and rarely 
does a day pass that they do not drag us into 
mischief, and expose us to burning shame. 

The question was not one of sustenance. It 
rose not out of the healthy action of the appetites 
which God had implanted for the nourishment of 
the bodily life. " God gave them bread from 
heaven to eat." It was distinctly a question of 
lust. Enough for appetite was there ; enough 
for all the uses of life, guaranteed by God ; " but 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 289 

they wept again, saying, who shall give us flesh 
to eat ; we rememher the fish which we did eat 
in Egypt freely — the cucumbers, and the melons, 
and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic ; 
but now our soul is dried away " — they meant 
their fat, their notion of a soul lay there — " there 
is nothing at all beside this manna before our 
eyes." Lust was strong in them, the love of the 
satisfaction of the bodily appetites for the sake 
of the momentary pleasure they bring. And 
appetite runs swiftly into lust in every one of 
us ; each act of indulgence opens a fresh mouth 
which craves to be fed. And till this troop of 
desires is taken in hand and curbed with an iron 
bit by a resolute will, there is no orderly march 
for us, no manly progress ; there are the seeds 
of panic and confusion in our array, and the 
devil's own terminus, a grave, awaiting us, before 
our pilgrimage is half done. The moment you 
take pleasure in the indulgence of appetite beyond 
the use for which it was ordained by God, you 
take an element into your life which will humble 
it, and drag its glory in the dust. Look back 
and see what deadly humiliation lust has already 
brought you ; what ulcerous sores, through which 
wells out so much of the pith and life-blood of 
your being. It is the grand battle of life, to 
teach lust the limits of Divine law, to break it 

19 



290 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH : 

in to the taste of the bread of heaven, and make 
it understand, that " man doth not live by bread 
alone, but by every word that cometh out of the 
mouth of God." 

2. The special season when the easily beset- 
ting sin rose up and again made them its slave. 

We have all of us a shrinking from a life-long 
struggle. One sharp battle we can stand ; yes, 
and one sharp pain — however sharp. Oh, could 
we but gather up our sins to one head, and sever 
it by one sweep of the Spirit's sword ! No matter 
how keen the agony, no matter if we bleed 
inwardly, and have to cauterize the wound ; we 
can stand all that, if we might but feel that sin 
was done with, was slain to rise again no more for 
ever. So strong is the passion for this complete 
deliverance, that we easily persuade ourselves 
that it is accomplished. The wish is father to 
the thought which sometimes, in moments of 
high and rapturous vision, visits us. Well, we 
say, that sin which has haunted me like a spectre, 
attended me like my double, is slain at last. I 
have laid it in its tomb ; other battles I may have 
to fight, but that slain foe I shall see no more. 
Look round ! yes, while the word is on your lip 
and the glad thought in your heart, look round. 
There, close by you, is the ghastly shape, ghastlier 
than ever, with a wicked Mephistopheies grin of 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 291 

satisfaction, that its clutch is tight upon you still. 
Oh, the sickening thought which then fills us ! 
Am I ever to be thus haunted ? Shall I ever 
shake off this infirmity ? Will it follow me to 
my grave, will it rise with me, and make a hell 
of my heaven ? 

Look at this orderly and gallant host. They 
had been baptized as God's soldiers by the splen- 
dours of the Mount of the Law. * Full of Divine 
joy, zeal, courage, hope, they set forward ; their 
hearts bounding with gladness, as the sound of 
the silver trumpets rang through the desert air 
and marshalled them on. " Scant fare, hard 
marching, fierce battles, but exhilarate us. The 
flesh-pots, the melons, the garlic, they belong 
to the days of our bondage ; we are free men 
now, and their power to tempt us is gone." 
And so many a gallant young spirit, having 
heard the trumpet-call of the Gospel, having girt 
on the armour of godly battle, and joined the 
glorious company of the soldiers of the Cross, 
the pilgrims of eternity, feels in the first pride 
of strength and flush of joy that the flesh is so 
bruised as to be broken and crushed for ever. 
There seems but to remain a merry speedyanarch 
to the possession of the goodly land. While the 
first flush of excitement lasts, it is so. You 
could pass then quite calmly through scenes of 

19—2 



292 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH : 

temptation which once would have set your 
passions in a blaze. But dread the hour when 
the glow begins to die down ; when the practical 
burdens, pains, trials which you still meet with, 
prove to you that the Divine life on earth is no 
paradise regained ; when you find your strength 
barely equal to the demands made upon it, and 
see stretching on through long years a path of 
struggle, denial, and mortification of the flesh, 
the end of which is not yet in sight. A chill 
despondency is wont at such a time to take the 
place of the glow of exhilaration ; and wonder 
not if in that moment the old demon of tempta- 
tion returns. And dread lest the rush of old 
associations, long repressed, should burst forth, 
and sweep you from your firm standing-ground 
into what may prove worse than the grave of your 
lust — the grave of your soul. 

It is a fact which all close students of human 
character must have observed, that there is a 
back-water of temptation, if I may so speak, 
which is more deadly than its direct assaults. 
You may fight hard against a temptation, and 
fight victoriously. You may beat it off, and 
crush it down ; and then, when, weary with the 
conflict, you suffer the strain of vigilance to 
relax, it shall steal in and easily master the 
citadel, which lately it spent all its force in vain 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 293 

to win. Beware of your best moments, as well 
as of your worst ; or rather the moments which 
succeed the best. They are the most perilous of 
all. Just when the consciousness of a triumph 
seems to permit and justify disarmament for a 
moment, the subtle foe with whom you have to 
deal will steal in on you, and win a treacherous 
victory. 

Never relax the strain. Never allow tempta- 
tion within arm's-length. Never forget that each 
new victory opens a new danger, and gives fresh 
call for vigilance and courage to keep what has 
been won. Never believe that the devil is asleep ; 
never believe that a besetting sin is eradicated ; 
never boast of a crowning victory ; lest Kibroth- 
Hattaavah, the graves of lust, be written on the 
head-stones that mark the chief stations of your 
pilgrimage; but " lay aside every weight, and 
the sin that doth so easily beset you, and run 
with patience the race that is set before you. 
Looking unto Jesus." Like Him, "resist even 
unto bloodstriving against sin." 

II. There comes a point in the history of the 
indulgence of besetting sins, when God ceases 
to strive with us and for us against them, and 
lets them have their way. 

Eemember, this was not the simple appetite 
for flesh, it was lasting for flesh, against the 



294 KIBROTH-HATTAAYAH : 

provisions of the wisdom and love of God. Quite 
otherwise did God respond even to their faithless 
murmuring for water and for bread, as we have 
seen. Bread and water He had provided out of 
His store with generous hand. But they would 
have flesh in spite of Him, and He let them have 
their way to its only end — the only bourne of 
self-will — a grave. It is worth our while to 
study closely this spiritual history, and to analyse 
the conditions out of which its catastrophe springs. 

1. God has great patience with the weaknesses 
and sins of the flesh. No one can read this 
history, and the life of the Saviour, without 
feeling how mercifully God deals with those who 
are overtaken in sin which springs out of the 
infirmities, appetites, and passions which belong 
to the bodily life. But it is a dreadful mistake 
to suppose that therefore He thinks lightly of 
them. He regards them as sins that must be 
conquered, and, no matter by what sharp discip- 
line, extirpated and killed. He knows that, if 
tolerated, they become the most deadly of spiri- 
tual evils, and rot body and spirit together in hell. 

2. Hence all the severer discipline by which 
the Lord seeks to purge them, the various agen- 
cies by which He fights with us and for us against 
their tyrannous power. 

What is life but one long discipline of God for 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 295 

the cleansing of the flesh ? Are not the after- 
pains of departed sensual joys among its chief 
stings and thorns ? God has made a sure link 
of connection between such sins and their penal- 
ties. The body itself is made the index of its 
indulgence; and the man and society are so 
organized, that their transgressions of God's laws 
bear a rapid harvest of sorrow and shame. Does 
He not give us the bread of heaven, that He 
may waken within us a taste for purer pleasures, 
and lead us out of the coils of the fleshly 
tempters by giving us the food of a Diviner life ? 
Doubtless the manna was something very different 
from the flesh-pots of Egypt; purer, fresher, 
more like the heaven from which it came. Less 
palatable probably to a gross taste, used to 
gorging ; more sweet to a fine and disciplined 
palate, to the man who ate simply to strengthen 
himself for higher things. Perhaps it symbo- 
lizes the whole of the higher interests and pur- 
suits of men as social and intellectual beings, 
which God supplies to wean them from gross 
feeding of the flesh ; as well as the true heavenly 
bread of righteousness, which if a man eat he 
hungers no more. It is only when a man will 
not enter into his Father's counsel in this ; tvill 
not suffer the higher tastes to develop themselves, 
and the higher appetites to indulge their cravings 



296 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH I 

with the bread of God ; will grovel when God 
gives him wings to soar; will go on the belly, 
snake -like, when God lifts him and sets his front 
face to face with heaven ; will clamour for flesh 
when the bread of God is in his very hand : it is 
only then, when the evil becomes deadly, and 
deepens into spiritual sin of the darkest dye and 
most incurable malignity, that God stays His 
hand, closes His witness, withdraws His guar- 
dian angel, and leaves the will to itself. 

Some into whose hands this book may fall are, 
I fear, being let alone by the Lord. He has 
witnessed, striven, smitten ; and all in mercy. 
There is a grave -stone in some churchyard which 
He has reared as a witness against lust and self- 
will in your life. Many an ill-gotten heap of 
gain He has scattered; many an idol He has 
broken ; many a picture, sermon, book, He has 
brought before your eyes to scare you, just when 
hot passion was in full pursuit of the prize ; but 
He does not seem so busy with you now. With 
a kind of easy assurance you now walk freely, 
where once you stepped as on a thin crust, which 
might crack and let you into an abyss. Beware, 
beware! God is letting you alone; and if "it 
is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the 
living God," it is more awful to be left by Him, 
to take your own road to death. 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 297 

3. Let alone by God. 

" Ephraim is joined to idols, let him alone ! " 
is to my mind among the most awful sentences in 
the word of God. 

How often does it happen, in the history of 
these wilful sinners of the flesh, that after a 
while all things seem to smile upon them and 
prosper them according to their heart's desires. 
Are they mad for gold ? gold seems to roll in upon 
them. Are they mad for pleasure ? their seduc- 
tive arts are successful, and victims come readily 
to their lure. Are they mad for drink ? those 
around them, kindred, friends, cease to strive 
with them, and give it up as hopeless ; shame, 
too, abandons them, they may wallow in beer 
or gin, nobody cares. It is very wonderful to 
see how often, if a man is bent on an end 
which is not God's end, God gives it him, and 
it becomes his curse. God does not curse us ; 
He leaves us to ourselves ; that is curse enough, 
and from that curse what arm can save us ! We 
will have it, and we shall have it. We leap 
through all the barriers which He has raised 
around us to limit us, yea, though they be rings 
of blazing fire, we will through them and indulge 
our lust ; and in a moment He sweeps them all 
out of our path — perhaps roses spring to beguile, 
where flames so lately blazed to warn. " Flesh, 



298 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH : 

give us flesh to eat ! This manna does not tickle 
the palate nor fire the blood. We will have 
flesh ! " " Yes ! here is flesh. You shall have it ; 
see here, in this blank wilderness, the flesh is 
falling round you in showers. Kill and eat; 
there is nothing to hinder you ; gorge yourselves, 
here is plenty ; and then lie down to sleep — the 
sleep of sated lust shall be your grave." This 
leads me on to observe — 

III. The end of that way is, inevitably and 
speedily, a grave. 

The grave of lust is one of the most awful of 
the inscriptions on the head- stones of the great 
cemetery, the world. 

The words in Psalm cvi. 13-15, " They soon 
forgat His ivories, they waited not for His counsel ; 
but lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tempted 
God in the desert. And He gave them theik 

REQUEST, BUT SENT LEANNESS INTO THEIR SOUL," 

cast much light on this passage. There the lust 
is spoken of as the grave of the soul. And I 
believe that it is the common form of God's judg- 
ment. Where He buries one in the wilderness, 
He suffers a thousand to bury themselves in their 
lust. It is the inevitable end of all wanton self- 
indulgence ; either a sharp judgment, or that slow 
pining of soul which makes the body its grave. 
Graves ! why there are a hundred before me at 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 299 

this moment. Where is the promise of your 
youth, sensualist ! where the resolution of your 
manhood ? Where is the purpose which that 
night on bended knees you uttered, and asked to 
have registered in heaven ? where the protesta- 
tions and vows to live " a godly, righteous, and 
sober life, looking for that blessed hope, the 
glorious appearing of the great God, and our 
Saviour Jesus Christ ? " Where ? — dead as the 
leaves of summer ! And where are the graves ? 
I need only look on that sensual face, that bloated 
form, that dull and glassy eye, that brazen brow, 
to tell. They are buried there, deep down in the 
flesh you pamper ; and there they rot, and rot the 
flesh that shrouds them, and will rot on till the 
last great burning day. How many of us are 
growing in wisdom, pureness, nobleness, charity, 
and grace, as the years roll on ; more Christlike, 
less disfigured and flawed by the blemishes of the 
flesh ? In how many do we now search in vain 
for fruits whose flowers once bloomed there ; for 
generous emotions, swift responses to the appeals 
of sorrow, unselfish ministries, and stern integ- 
rity ? How many have learnt now to laugh at 
emotions which once had a holy beauty in their 
sight ; to fence skilfully with appeals which once 
would have thrilled to the very core of their 
hearts ; to grasp at advantages which once they 



300 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH : 

would have passed with a scornful anathema, and 
to clutch at the gold which was once the glad 
instrument of diffusing benefits around ! Yes ! 
there are graves enough around us — graves of 
passion, graves of self-will, graves of lust. 

There is that pompous and impressive mil- 
lionnaire, a man whose word is good for millions, 
to whom the leaders of commerce pay deference, 
as to a great power in their state. He is most 
admirably correct in all his transactions; a good 
giver, too, liberal by repute, his name is against a 
large sum in all public subscriptions. Go to him 
with a case which the rulers and Pharisees believe 
in, and you will never be sent empty away ; but let 
a poor wretch cross his private path and whine for 
a morsel, a dog would hardly get such a brutal 
rebuff. Let a servant in his employ yield in a 
dark hour to temptation, wrong him, and throw 
himself on his mercy, you may get blood out of a 
rock sooner than one compassionate word from 
that ruthless heart. There is a whited sepulchre 
of a soul ! Once he was a poor boy ; he had but 
a crust in the wide world, and he shared it with a 
poorer comrade, without a regret, without a care. 
Once he loved, too, and was beloved. His heart 
was large, warm, genial. He valued life for its 
friendships and relationships ; its claims glad- 
dened him, its duties inspired. But that has 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 301 

long, long been buried. A cold sneer, whenever 
he thinks of it, is its epitaph. One day, when he 
is dead, and they bear him pompously to his 
splendid tomb, there will be lawyers and heirs at 
his strong-box, to rifle the secrets which he has 
so jealously and successfully hid. Pile on pile of 
papers and securities is arranged there in admi- 
rable order. But there is an inner cabinet, a 
secret drawer — surely the sum of the whole is 
treasured there, the coveted balance-sheet of his 
affairs. No key is found, no spring can be dis- 
covered ; they burst it open at length, and find 
there — a faded letter, a withered flower, and a 
lock of a woman's hair ! He buried them there 
years ago, when he buried his higher nature, of 
which they are the memorial, in — himself. 

There is a brilliant woman of society ; so gay, 
so witty, so genial, so friendly, the life of her 
circle, the idol of a crowd of empty friends. At 
home — and she is rarely to be found there — there 
is a chill, bad atmosphere. The children are 
made over to a careless governess; the mother 
cannot bear their worry. The husband is simply 
the sponge which she squeezes with ruthless con- 
stancy for her expenses, and casts aside as ruth- 
lessly when that one end is gained. Society is 
her idol ; a place, a name, an influence, she will 
have, at any cost ; and she is digging another of 



302 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH : 

the Kibroth-hattaavah — the graves. of lust. Once 
there was a warm, wifely, motherly heart in her ; 
once she looked up fondly in that man's face, and 
vowed to be the joy and sunlight of his life. Once, 
beautiful, holy tears filled her eyes as she gazed 
down on her first-born on her bosom, and vowed 
a mother's love and tenderness to the little nurs- 
ling of her heart. But that was all buried long- 
ago. The world possesses her wholly ; she is the 
mere charnel-house of a soul. The finer natures 
feel it already, and avoid her; and soon all will 
see it and shrink from its corruption. Your worn- 
out woman of the world looks more like a 
sepulchre than anything else upon this earth. 

There is another man ; a father, let us say, 
with a cheerful home, wife, children, and suffi- 
cient comforts round him, who persuades himself 
that misfortune has marked him for her prey. 
His son, the pride of his heart, may have dis- 
honoured his name, or his daughter sullied the 
purity of his home ; his circumstances have be- 
come embarrassed; he struggles hard to keep 
pace with the time, but finds himself falling slowly 
but hopelessly into the rear. He struggles all 
the harder because the process is a slow one, and 
he can fight against ruin inch by inch. But the 
battle is against him. At home he has no joy ; 
abroad no hope. Little by little he begins to find 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 303 

some comfort in the passing exhilaration of drink; 
for the moment it enables him to laugh, and to 
snap his fingers at fate. The habit, once esta- 
blished, becomes tyrannous. He has no re- 
sources of mind or spirit to fall back upon, and 
no will to cry to Him who, when " all His waves 
and billows" were surging over David, "com- 
manded His loving-kindness in the daytime, and 
His songs in the night." He begins to come home 
in the evening excited ; he stutters out his re- 
quests ; often he is plainly intoxicated ; they have 
to lead him to bed like an idiot. Then he sits 
boozing alone by his own fireside, till his children 
get sick at heart, perhaps fierce against him ; per- 
haps they fly his home to escape the atmosphere of 
misery he has created there. His wife, well-nigh 
broken-hearted, begins to seek refuge in the same 
excitements. They sit drinking together in their 
abandoned home ; they exchange drunken caresses, 
or curses, as the case may be ; they abuse each 
other's vices, they swear, fight, clutch each other 
by the throat, and their neighbours or children 
part them ; they are overwhelmed with shame for 
the moment, but soon bury shame, too, in lust. 
The scene recurs, it gets talked of in the neighbour- 
hood, whispered among friends ; acquaintances 
cut them, friends remonstrate in vain, and forsake 
them, and their home becomes fairly a hell. The 



304 KIBROTH-HATTAAVAH : 

accursed lust sets its mark on their forehead. 
Bloated features, trembling limbs, stuttering 
speech, and a mad thirst that goads them on to 
deeper orgies. Friends, let us drop the veil. 
God keep us from the temptation to bury misery 
in a grave of lust ! 

Beware, young men ; young women, beware ! 
The grave-diggers began their work far back, in 
those wretched histories. The first step was the 
really fatal one : the first flying, in sorrow and 
heart-ache, to any refuge but God. Beware ! for 
the dead things buried in these graves will not lie 
quiet; they stir and start, and ever and anon 
come forth in their ghastly shrouds and scare you 
at your feasts. No ghosts so sure to haunt their 
graves, as the ghosts of immolated faculties and 
violated vows. That purpose, that prayer, that 
ennobling friendship or love, sacrificed to interest, 
that high ideal of relationship abandoned for lust, 
they are dead, but they have their resurrections. 
The memories which haunt the worn-out world- 
ling's bed of impotence or lust, are the true 
avengers of Heaven. The brain loses power to 
repel them, but retains power to fashion them. 
Once it could drive away thoughts and memories ; 
now it can only retain them, and fix them in a 
horrid permanent session on their thrones. Each 
act of indulgence makes the grave wider and 



THE GRAVES OF LUST. 305 

deeper, where the whole breadth of God-like 
faculty will at length lie buried ; and it fixes in 
the brain a memory which will one day turn 
tyrant, and be the dread avenger of a murdered 
hope. I know that the thought, "Kejoice, 
young man, in thy youth," is strong in the young- 
heart . " God is merciful to these young follies," 
you say ; "age will give soberness, and repair the 
waste." If ever the devil is tempting you to 
believe that, and to break down the barriers which 
you have built up against the impetuosities of 
passion and the ragings of lust ; if ever you feel 
that the firm hand is trembling, and that the 
reins of control are slipping from the strong grasp 
of the will, then open the eleventh chapter of 
Numbers ; go out alone into that desert ; look at 
those mounds which break its weary monotony, 
and spell out the word which is burnt into their 
headstones, sharp and clear at this moment as 
when the finger of God inscribed it, "Kibroth- 

HATTAAVAH THE GRAVES OP LUST ! " 



20 



THE WANDERINGS.' 



The Common Levels of Life. 

a And thoa shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy 
God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, 
and to prove thee, to knoiv what was in thine heart, whether thou 
wouldest keep his commandments, or no." — Dent. yiii. 2. 

Tiniest insects build up loftiest mountains. 
Broad bands of solid rock, which undergird the 
earth, have been welded by the patient, constant 
toil of invisible creatures, working on through the 
ages unhasting, unresting, fulfilling their Maker's 
will. On the shores of primaeval oceans, watched 
only by the patient stars, these silent workmen 
have been building for us the structure of the 
world. And thus the obscure work of unknown 
nameless ages appears at last in the sunlight, the 
adorned and noble theatre of that life of man, 
which, of all that is done in this universe, is 
fullest before God of interest and hope. 

It is thus too in life. The quiet moments 
build the years. The labours of obscure and 
unremembered hours edify that palace of the 
soul, in which it is to abide, and fabricate that 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 307 

organ whereby it is to work and express itself, 
through eternity. It is of these common places, 
or common levels of life, that I have now to speak 
to you, the obscure records of long wanderings 
through dull and dusty pathways in our wilder- 
ness world. 

The history of this people must again be our 
guide. We left the Israelites mourning beside 
the graves of lust : we find them on the very 
borders of the promised land. The Desert behind 
them, bright Canaan before them, God's angel in 
the midst of them, waiting to lead them to 
victory and glorious rest. The fact that they are 
there, speaks an inspiring word to all of us. 
Blessed be Christ, we are none of us doomed to lie 
moaning by graves. Forth from the heart of the 
deepest darkness that ever settled over a grave, 
even of lust, the word of Him who is the resur- 
rection and the life cometh unto the mourner, 
"He that believeth in me, though he mere dead, yet 
shall he live : and whosoever liveth and believeth in 
me shall never die," It is well that we should 
stand by our graves and feel their awfulness ; it is 
well that we should taste the agony of the chastised 
and smitten soul. But that man is false to 
Christ, and faithless, who suffers himself to be 
tempted to say, " There in that grave lie buried 
all my treasures ; hope is bankrupt ; a grave 

20—2 



308 " THE WANDERINGS." 

Iiencefortli is the sanctuary of my spirit; that 
headstone epitaphs my life." 

I know that the temptation often presses 
heavily. In the first anguish of chastisement, it 
seems to us as if hope were fairly killed. But 
just as Kibroth-hattaavah was near to the border 
of Canaan, so are the graves by which our 
bitterest tears are wept, near to the bounds of 
heaven. The saddest and most hopeless case 
before man, is when a man has made a grave of 
himself, and has buried deep down in the slough 
of a worldly or sensual nature every bud and 
promise of his soul. Yet even these deep graves 
can be broken by the Saviour's voice. Even 
these dead men can rise. His hope is deeper 
than man's despair, for His arm is stronger than 
man's destroyer. You have but to cry to Him 
with the long strong outcry of a soul ready to 
perish, sinking into the graves of lust, and even 
thence His arm can snatch you, and set you in 
front of the promised land. 

To me it is full of the grandest meaning. And 
oh ! what a gospel it should be to you, who feel 
the soul well nigh buried in some sensual tomb, 
that the angel who led them did not destroy them 
there in the mass, every man of them, while the 
flesh was yet between their teeth, and passion was 
mad ; he but smote them sharply, and then led 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 309 

them on to the vision of the land of rest. It was 
a weary march on from Kibroth-hattaavah to 
Kadesh, probably as far as we can identify the 
stations, the dreariest of the whole route, (it is 
never a bright path, that onward march from a 
grave) : but their next station set them actually 
within sight, within reach of rest. Their merci- 
ful God did not accept their lusting for flesh as 
their final decision. One act of sensual lust, 
dark, deadly as it was, was not to be the turning 
point of their lives. Once more they were to go 
forth one step out into a clearer air than that 
which steams around the fleshpots, and under a 
brighter heaven ; and then it should be settled, 
and settled finally. Shall it be a brief stern 
battle march to Canaan and triumph, or a shame- 
ful rout to the wilderness and death ? Whatever 
may seem, it is never on one hasty act of passion 
that destiny hinges ; it is on the broad, calm, 
decisive elections of the soul. Men curse the 
passionate acts, or the unpremeditated moments 
which seem to cast a shadow upon the whole of 
their life course, and give a new character to their 
future. The roots of the acts lie in the depths 
of their being, and such unpremeditated moments 
are the fruits of the meditations of years. It is 
the whole aspect of the soul, as its vision ranges 
over the field of life's enterprise, counts the costs, 



310 " THE WANDERINGS." 

measures the perils, and balances the chances of 
defeat or victory, that Christ is watching. The 
vision is then clear, bright, enchanting. " The 
land is a good land," cry the heavenly voices ; 
" surely it floweth with milk and honey, and thou 
art well able to overcome it." " Nay," cry the 
earthly, "but the Anakim are there; the cities 
are walled and strong ; the battle must be long 
and desperate, and we are but as grasshoppers 
in the presence of those gigantic foes. The case 
is hopeless, the strain of the battle is harder than 
we can bear; even Canaan is not worth win- 
ning at such a cost. Back ! back ! We are not 
fit for great enterprises. Sadly enough we feel 
it ; the fleshpots must be our portion, and Egypt 
must be our grave." 

There is one grand damning sin of man^ — 
unbelief. That people "believed not, and their 
carcases fell in the wilderness." It is not on any 
isolated sin or even crime, but on the deep unbelief 
of our hearts, broadly, strongly, finally expressed, 
that the • angel sets our faces decisively to the 
wilderness, and trains us there in long marches, 
wanderings, and conflicts, for a glorious possession 
of the promised land. This is the root sin of all 
of us. A comparison of the topic of the eleventh 
chapter of the Hebrews, with the first verse of the 
twelfth, will show that this is the sin of which the 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 311 

apostle is speaking, when lie warns us of the sin 
" which doth so easily beset us." It is just this 
faithlessness. And it is when this root sin of our 
nature is laid bare, as it is laid bare in every one 
of us before the eye of God, that He turns us 
back into the desert from the very edge of the 
land of rest. " And thou shall remember all the 
way tvhich the Lord thy God led thee these forty 
years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove 
thee, to know what teas in thine heart, uhether thou 
wouldest keep His commandments, or no. And He 
humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed 
thee with manna, which thou hnewest not, neither did 
thy fathers hioiv ; that He might make thee know 
that man doth not live by bread only, but by every 
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord 
doth man live. Thy raiment ivaxed not old upon 
thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years. 
Thou shalt edso consider in thine heart, that, as a man 
chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee. 
Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments oftheLord 
thy God, to walk in His ivays, and to fear Him." 
(Deut. viii. 2—6.) 

The forty years' wanderings ! What remains 
of them? A list of unknown names, no more. 
The dust of time has settled on the stations ; 
and the events, big at the time with in- 
terest to millions, are without a note in history. 



312 " THE WANDERINGS." 

What weary years of plodding marches through 
a dark unheavenly country ; what dreads and 
dangers, what wants and distresses, what keen 
agonies and fierce complaints, that oblivious silence 
covers ! They are all there, clays of fighting, 
nights of weeping, years of trudging. They 
seemed at the moment as if they were burning 
an indelible mark deep into life records ; as if 
things were done and suffered there, the memory 
of which would ache or glow through eternity ; 
but they are already behind us, dim in the distance, 
a softening veil has fallen over the whole pil- 
grimage : a broad sense of pain conquered, shame 
endured, duty done ; the consciousness that we 
have come out of the wanderings richer, braver, 
stronger, more earnest, but sadder, than when we 
entered the Desert, is all that is left to us. And 
this is the heritage which the obscure paths and 
hours hand down to all of us, to bear with us, 
if found faithful, into the inheritance of the 
promised land. 

And this brief abstract of the wanderings is a 
chapter out of your life and mine. Who knows 
anything about ninety-nine out of every hundred 
of the moments which make our lives ? Do we 
know much about them ourselves ? Very many 
of the most important of our bodily movements 
are automatic. We contract the heart, expand 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 313 

the lungs, exhale the breath, without the slightest 
consciousness that we are at work in the very 
laboratory of life ; and that if that work were 
stopped for an instant, this fair fabric would fall 
straightway into waste and death. 

And how much of our higher activity, as 
intelligent and moral beings, is automatic too ! 
It is no very conscious or noble act of volition 
which takes us down daily to our accustomed 
tasks, seats us at the accustomed desk, marches 
us through the same wearisome waste of figures, 
or yokes us to the same dull mill-wheel, where 
we grind, grind, grind, and make grist for the 
hungry mouths at home. It is just matter of 
strong and stern compulsion, as with those 
Israelites of old. We should like, when the 
reality of the life forces itself on us, a shorter 
and swifter path to our end. " Nay, but we 
will go up." We will storm fortune by a bold 
stroke, we will seize by a spurt of enthusiasm 
what will give us rest and plenty, and spare 
ourselves this monotony of toil and trouble all 
our days. But we are not fit for rest and plenty. 
It would be but indolence and surfeit ; we have 
shown our faithlessness too lately to be trusted. 
God will not let us go. He leads us out into the 
desert, where we mast wander till our lusts, at 
any rate, are killed, where we must work and 



314 " THE WANDERINGS/ ' 

wait till the appetite gets tamed, where we must 
watch the bands of robbers who prowl around our 
encampments, till vigilance become perfect, and we 
are thus prepared by the daily habit of energy and 
patience to wield nobly the sceptre of the kingdom 
which we shall win. How much of our lives is hard 
dull duty, blank, bare, and dust- stained as that 
level plain — the El Tih, the vast dry limestone 
plateau of the desert which I have described to 
you * — contrasting so strangely with the rich 
interest of the Sinai desert — the dreariest scene 
of wanderings that can be conceived ! It answers 
to the common levels of life ; the unremembered 
years of undistinguished toil. The years of work 
to which we were bound, pining the while for 
nobler, and thinking that we were fit for it, though 
God did not; kicking under the yoke — something 
like the poor camels in those wastes, moaning 
and shrieking piteously under their burdens — but 
on the whole struggling on, bearing them manfully, 
not daring to unbind them, but pining — oh, how 
longingly ! — for the hour when God should release 
us, and lead us, inured to duty, into the sunny 
pastures, by the living waters, of the long-lost, 
long- sought home ! 

Nothing of all these marches survives but a 

* The name Tby which this dreary region of the Desert is 
known is El Tih, which means " The Wanderings." 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 315 

vague memory of pain, patience, and hope. Those 
stations of our journey which stand out against 
the common background of life, the touches of 
form and colour which light up its neutral tints, 
— the Marahs, Elims, Eephidims, — are clear in 
memory at this moment, after the lapse of years, 
and will be clear through eternity. There I 
buried Each el ; there I wrestled with the Angel, 
and prevailed ; there the angels of God met me ; 
there I took my father's blessing ; there I sealed 
my covenant with G-od ; there my vows were 
shamefully broken ; there I grovelled in peni- 
tence, and was uplifted in prayer ; there I fainted 
under the burden of my cross ; there my soul 
sweat blood-drops in its Gethsemane, and there 
appeared unto me an angel from God strengthen- 
ing me ; — we recall them all, clear as though the 
sunlight were on them, defining their outlines 
and blackening their shadows. These are the 
sacred treasures — these memories — which we bear 
with us weeping through our life-course here, and 
these are the fruit which shall enrich, the trophies 
which shall glorify, eternity. 

In order that we may better understand the 
method of God in ordering our wilderness 
marches, let us consider — 

I. The reason of " the wanderings." Why is 
so large a portion of our years spent under the 



316 " THE WANDERINGS." 

yoke of undistinguished duties, leaving no record 
but " the wanderings" behind ? 

Briefly, because a few critical experiences do 
not make a character ; a few impassioned, enthu- 
siastic moments do not make a life. We must 
remember that this people had passed through a 
series of exciting and impressive scenes, unparal- 
leled in history. There had been crowded into 
their last months, events which have made an era 
in the history of eternity. They had lived rapidly 
through the stages of experience which mark the 
development of a life. They had passed from 
infancy to manhood at a bound. The " stations" 
had succeeded each other in swift succession ; and 
on each they had spent a treasure of thought and 
feeling which, if husbanded, would have formed 
the wealth of years. Higher and deeper expe- 
riences they could not have. Providence had 
exhausted the art of impression, and the people 
had exhausted the power of being impressed. 
They had been awed, affrighted, warned, in- 
structed, guided, inspired, but they had not had 
time to live ; that is, to work the fruit of these 
extraordinary moments of vision or suffering into 
the common texture of their lives. 

"We are all, in fact, unconscious poets, and live 
in the ideal. The commonest lover, after some 
fashion, sings. We all dream our dream of Utopia. 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 317 

We have all our Atlantis there across the waters ; 
or visions of an Eden, contrasting strangely with 
the dry and dull daily wastes of life. We have 
our moments of high excitement, when the spirit 
is stirred, and asserts its mastery. Thick films 
seem to fall from the eyes of sense, and the 
nerves are strung to catch the most tremulous 
vibrations of that finer fluid, which is the channel 
of all the higher communications of our world. 
It seems, at such moments, as if the organ of 
capacity had grown within us to grand pro- 
portions ; as if we had but to will, to throw off 
the fleshly clog for ever, and step forth into a 
world in which the soul's volitions, sympathies, 
and elections should be supreme. We dream a 
poet's dream of life, and we awake, thinking for 
the moment that we hold what we touched in 
dreams. The day of duty disenchants us. We find 
that the glow of the spirit, fired with momentary 
passion, is not strength ; that the vision of what 
life may be, is not life. 

The children of Israel there before the Mount, 
saw the vision. The glorious splendour, the 
thunderings, lightnings, and the voice of God, so 
overawed their spirits, so crushed down their 
sensual lusts and choked back their faithless 
murmurs, that it seemed for the moment the 
most glorious and noble life, to serve such a Lord 



318 "THE WANDERINGS." 

Jehovah as this. " All that the Lord hath said 
unto us that will we do," they cried to Moses, 
when he rehearsed before them all the Lord's 
commandments ; and they meant it heartily, as 
you have meant it, when the spell of the world 
has been broken for the moment, when under the 
word of some inspiring preacher, or under the 
shade of some terrible calamity, or in some of 
those high moments of visitation, which — how, 
why, we know not — do at times bring the reality 
of God and heavenly things most blessedly near 
to our hearts. You have then lifted your heart 
to God with a passion of supplication that He 
would take you to be His pilgrim, and lead you 
by His own good path to His home. How long 
was it before those Israelites were dancing around 
their golden calf, and singing, " These be thy gods, 
Israel, that led thee oat of the land of Egypt." 
And where are your vows ? Where the sword and 
shield which you then girt to' you ? Where the 
crown which was then in sight ? May God help us 
not to live by dreams ! We have our moments of 
vision, blessed be God, before the pilgrimage 
begins ; clearer, brighter, more blessed moments, 
like Moses, like Paul, we have before the pilgri- 
mage ends. But a moment's intense vision, high 
resolution, earnest endeavour, glorious victory, 
will not expand into a grand Eternity. God will 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 319 

try us, what metal we are of within ; what lies 
under all exceptional experience ; what He can 
rely upon to maintain in constancy a high, full 
pulse of life. 

Hence we are taken forth to Kaclesh. The 
whole country is spread before us ; God's vocation 
reaches us, — clear, solemn, decisive ; He calls on 
us to go up to possess the land. To every human 
spirit the vocation comes once at any rate. " Go 
up and possess thy land of promise ; make real 
thy dreams. Thou hast had a vision of this to 
sustain thee through many an earlier desert march ; 
and now it is here, go up and take it. Have done 
with sin, with tremor, with murmuring, for ever ; 
live a divine man in a broad and wealthy land." 
And none of us is able. No man lives up to the 
level of his young resolutions and aspirations ; 
no man keeps his heel firmly on the lusts and 
passions which in moments of divine visitation 
he scorned. Who is able to square his life by 
the heavenly rules which at such moments seem 
so grand and fair ? The moment comes when 
the senses fire again, and grow mad after their 
idols ; when the heavenly rules have a veil dropped 
over them, they are too pure for a world like 
this ! And at last the vision comes to be remem- 
bered with a kind of contemptuous wonder, 



320 " THE WANDERINGS." 

"Was I ever fool enough to entertain in earnest 
such a dream of life ! " 

The inevitable falling off of the common hours 
and experiences, from the level of the moments 
when our life gets up into the world which was 
made to be its home, seems to me to be the great 
teaching of this passage of Israel's history. It 
is a broad fact in the history of every life ; in a 
measure, of every day's life, for the great cycles 
repeat themselves in little, as the organs of the 
body are present potentially in every part. But 
these narratives gather up the scattered incidents 
of our moral life into one grand incident, and 
show us with a large dramatic point and emphasis, 
what we are daily doing under the eye of the 
great Leader, which makes these long, dry, unnoted 
wanderings inevitable ; what it is which compels 
Him to impose what I have called the yoke of 
undistinguished duty, and to lead us up and 
down in the wilderness, that we may, if we will 
yield ourselves to His hand, work the sublime 
lessons, which we cannot learn and practise in a 
moment, into the common daily texture of life, 
that is, of eternity. We will now pass on to 
consider, 

II. The purpose of the wanderings. 

Briefly, again, to work godly principles of 
action into the common texture of our daily 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 321 

lives. To make it a matter of perpetual, quiet 
choice and habit to square every action by the 
rule of the mind of God. 

There are two states of mind possible, and more 
than possible, about these wanderings. There are 
two states of mind with which we are constantly 
meeting, with regard to the commonplace cha- 
racter of so much of our daily lives. We may 
say, " It is weary work, but we must do it ; God 
yokes us to it, and there is no escape from Hhxu 
But we have no call to put anything into it but 
submission. Submit we must, and will ; but we 
have no need to do more, for the thing we hate. 
We must just go through with it, if God compels 
us, — by those modes of moral compulsion which 
preserve our liberty, and yet necessitate action in the 
direction which He has decreed — to waste almost 
the whole of our lives in a round of busy occupa- 
tions which simply wearies us ; to which, perhaps, 
by some act of a half-awakened nature, we bound 
ourselves in youth, by a bond which we have to 
honour sorrowfully with matured sympathies and 
developed powers. We must just go through with 
it. We shall not flinch. The work shall be done, 
the round shall be tramped as speedily as may be, 
and then we will give ourselves up to thoughts, 
reminiscences, or longings, which will embody the 
true aspiration and bias of our hearts." Or we 

21 



322 * THE WANDERINGS." 

may say, " God has bound us thus, because He 
loves us most tenderly ; not to compel us by His 
bare will, but because He is Himself compelled by 
His great love. Not in bitterness, not in wrath, 
not even in judgment, if we could fathom the 
deepest springs of His will, has he relegated us to 
this wilderness. It is before Him, less a judgment 
on the past than an education for the future, 
though it partakes of both characters : it is 
because of the great world — a good land and a 
large — into which He will bring us out, and the 
God-like work He has for us in eternity, that He 
has sent us hither, and bound us to tasks which 
fret and exhaust us. We shall be in the way of 
blessing in doing them heartily, in exercising our 
noblest faculties on our most common duties, in 
making the sphere of our daily toils and frets 
illustrious by heavenly strength, patience, and 
hope : content, if we miss the fruit in the present, 
if, like seed-corn cast on the waters, it vanishes 
from touch and sight, to believe that we shall find 
it again — the fruit of every grain with royal in- 
crease — in the long day of eternity." 

I say there are these two states of mind possible 
about those wanderings — the first common, the 
last, alas ! more rare. There are no records to 
tell us, but I know well which this people elected, 
I can see it in their gallant courage when they 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 323 

stood again before the gates of Palestine ; in their 
prompt submission to every divine behest ; in their 
brave endurance of the toils and perils under which 
once they fainted; and in their manly resolute 
adherence to their covenant with God, in the face 
of all the discouragement which drove their fathers 
into the desert, and made them ready to fly to 
Egypt, to fly anywhere, if they might but escape 
from a God who seemed to demand so much of 
them, — who seemed to expect of poor weak 
mortals that they should aim, at any rate, at that 
lofty life which would liken them unto Himself.* 
The foUowing passage out of the book of Joshua 
will amply sustain my words, and show how much 
this people had gained : — " And if it seem evil 
unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day 
whom ye will serve : whether the gods which your 
fathers served that were on the other side of the 
flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land 
ye dwell : but as for me and my house, we will 
serve the Lord. And the people answered and 
said, God forbid that we should forsake the Lord, 

* It is no answer to this view to say that those who went 
into Canaan were the sons — the sires fell in the wilderness. 
We have a right to speak of the nation as a unity ; and more 
than this, if the fathers had continued in a slavish or murmur- 
ing mood, their sons had never been nursed to such godly 
manhood. 

21—2 



324 " THE WANDERINGS. 



j> 



to serve other gods ; for the Lord our God, He it 
is that brought us up and our fathers out of the 
land of Egypt, from the house of bondage, and 
which did those great signs in our sight, and pre- 
served us in all the way wherein we went, and 
among all the people through whom we passed : 
and the Lord drave out from before us all the 
people, even the Amorites which dwelt in the 
land : therefore will we also serve the Lord ; for 
He is our God. And Joshua said unto the people, 
Ye cannot serve the Lord : for He is an holy God ; 
He is a jealous God; He will not forgive your 
transgressions nor your sins. If ye forsake the 
Lord, and serve strange gods, then He will turn 
and do you hurt, and consume you, after that He 
hath done you good. And the people said unto 
Joshua, Nay ; but we will serve the Lord. And 
Joshua said unto the people, Ye are witnesses 
against yourselves that ye have chosen you the Lord, 
to serve Him. And they said, We are witnesses. 
Now, therefore, put away, said he, the strange 
gods which are among you, and incline your heart 
unto the Lord God of Israel. And the people 
said unto Joshua, The Lord our God will we serve, 
and His voice will we obey. So Joshua made a 
covenant with the people that day, and set them 
a statute and an ordinance in Shechem. And 
Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 325 

of God, and took a great stone, and set it up there 
under an oak, that was by the sanctuary of the 
Lord. And Joshua said unto all the people, 
Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto us ; for 
it hath heard all the words of the Lord which He 
spake unto us : it shall be therefore a witness unto 
you, lest ye deny your God. So Joshua let the 
people depart, every man unto his inheritance." 
— Josh. xxiv. 15-28. 

There is the fruit of the forty years' wanderings, 
the commonplaces, the common events of their 
lives. They became noble, daring, patient soldiers 
of the Lord God of Hosts, who was able to speak 
to them with a plainness, and wield them with a 
force, unparalleled in any other period of their or 
the world's history. And how did they attain to 
it ? We can answer absolutely, by repeating, day 
by day, day by day, day by day, the lessons which 
they had learnt in those high moments in which 
they had seemed to be exalted above the human 
level, and to be admitted within the veil to God. 
Daily, during those forty years, we may be well 
assured, the Lord was repeating the lessons of 
Marah, Elira, Rephidim, and Sinai ; not under 
the high excitements which lifted those stations 
so far above the ordinary human ranges of ex- 
perience, but in the quiet hours of daily pilgrimage, 
daily hunger, thirst, sickness, temptation, and terror 



326 " THE WAOT)EKEN-GS." 

of foes. Each day of their obscure wanderings was 
a high day in miniature ; nay, perhaps more 
blessed than a high day, because the Lord could 
come nearer to the common levels of their ex- 
perience, and edify there the structure of a noble 
and godly life. 

Brethren, if our holy days are to shed no 
sacredness on our work days, we are better, far 
better, without them. Better Egypt, the flesh- 
pots, the fish, the melons, the garlic, and the 
slave's carelessness about his daily bread, than a 
life with visions of Heaven which remain ever no 
more than dreams. If you keep all the richer 
interest of your spirit for the holy days of life, if 
you concentrate all your thought and fervour in 
the moments when you seem to be lifted into 
the empyrean regions, and breathe the air of a 
diviner world than this, you are doing your best 
to turn into foolishness God's counsels about your 
wanderings in the wilderness of life. You can do 
it if you will. Man can turn God's wisdom into 
foolishness. He may make his forty years' 
wanderings — the term of an average manhood — 
a weary, hateful drudge, and fall ignobly at the 
end of it, leaving his bones to bleach on the 
sand. But this people judged more nobly of their 
vocation. They learnt bravely, in their years of 
toil and trudge, the lessons which, in the high 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 327 

days of their wilderness career, had slipped so 
swiftly out of their hearts. They accepted the 
daily discipline ; failed often, murmured often, 
repented often, and renewed their way; but 
always with a clear growth of strength and wisdom, 
a higher spring after each recoil ; until Gi-od saw 
that they were fit for the enterprise at the sight 
of which their fathers fainted, and led them up to 
the swift conquest and armed possession of the 
land. 

And now tell me, brother, is the wilderness a 
loathed and soul-w r earying pilgrimage, or a grand 
training-ground of God ? Are you despising your 
daily tasks, or magnifying them ? Do you cry 
wildly, " Why does God tie me here to tasks which 
I abominate ? Oh ! for some work which will meet 
and satisfy the finer appetites and subtler sym- 
pathies of my soul ; but this wholly expends my 
higher faculty : it makes life a waste, and the 
future a blank." Or do you say, " God, my God, 
has bound me here, because He knows what 
eternity means, and what I have to do there. 
Because of the grandeur of my future, He is not 
ashamed to make the scene of my present dis- 
cipline so bare and poor. He is training me to be 
faithful in the few things thoroughly ; to rule the 
little that is under my power with the bold, free, 
royal hand of the heir of a kingdom ; then He 



328 " THE WANDERINGS.' ' 

will lift me to a throne. Be my one work here to 
make the commonplaces and levels as fall of His 
presence as the Holy of Holies, where His glory 
dwells ; so to beautify earth's dull paths by 
heavenly patience and joyfulness, that the angels 
of God may frequent them ; and to handle the 
commonest tools and materials as a man who is 
daily building up a character and a destiny, which 
will rise, stately and fair, not among the perishing 
fabrics that shall share the wreck of earth's dissolu- 
tion, but in the calm heaven of eternity. 

This leads me to speak of — 

III. The " wanderings," in view of their eternal 
results. 

They, obscure and unprofitable as they may 
seem, are the builders for eternity. It is easy to 
say that the great crises make the common ex- 
periences of our lives, and determine both their 
track and character. There is a surface truth in 
such an impression. It is at the great crises that 
the changes in character and course become mani- 
fest ; and we are ready to believe easily that the 
reasons of them, too, are there. The grand direc- 
tion of our life -course seems to be determined 
by what transpires in critical moments, in which, 
as far as our consciousness is concerned, our 
will is well nigh powerless, while the current of 
external influence eddies around us, and whirls us 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 329 

away. True enough : it does seem just to seize 
us and sweep us away. But what makes the 
"us?" What makes that within us which will 
yield to it, and be swept along pleasantly by its 
current, lulled by the soft music of its waters, till 
they cast it up, a wreck, on some rock-bound, 
eternal shore ; or which will battle against the 
current, will sooner or later make some landing, 
it may be but on some dreary, marshy islet, and 
will begin at once to edify there a fortress of life ? 
What makes that ? First, fundamentally, effec- 
tually, the Spirit of the living God, the Holy 
Ghost, who " worketh in us to will and to do of 
His own good pleasure." " Not by might, not 
by power, but by My Spirit," saith the Lord, and 
saith the awakened human conscience, of every 
effectual stand against evil, of every fortress of 
life which is edified against sin. But there must 
be concert of the clinging and trusting human 
will with the victorious force of the Spirit, in order 
to the realization of the fruits of spiritual life. 
That the faithless multitude in all ages is swept 
away by the current, must have some other reason 
than that the Spirit — who with the Father and 
the Son is Love — is not willing to put forth effec- 
tual power to save them. Those men there, before 
the gates of Canaan, settled their own destiny, 
against the commands of God and the testimony 



330 " THE WANDERINGS." 

of His witnesses. Stephen testifies that this was 
a resisting the Holy Ghost ; and against the same, 
the multitude are settling their destinies still. And 
it appears to me most important that we should 
understand that no mere moment, no isolated act 
of choice, under a pressure of temptation, settles 
destinies. The quiet, undistinguished years decide 
the matter for the moments when the election is 
finally and openly made. It takes years to give a 
form and bent to a character. Temperament we 
are horn with, character we have to make ; and 
that not in the grand moments, when the eyes of 
men or of angels are visibly upon us, but in the 
daily quiet paths of pilgrimage, when the work is 
being done within in secret, which will be revealed 
in the daylight of eternity. 

Habits, like paths, are the result of constant 
actions. It is the multitude of daily footsteps 
which go to and fro which shapes them. Let it 
light up your daily wanderings to know that there — 
in the quiet bracing of the soul to uncongenial 
duty, the patient bearing of unwelcome burdens, 
the loving acceptance of unlovely companionship 
—and not on the grand occasions, you are making 
your eternal future. It is the multitude of little 
actions which make the great ones. I mean this 
absolutely. Tell me the habit of a man's soul in 
his daily undistinguished wanderings, and I will 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 331 



tell you the part he is destined to play in the 
great crises of life. As I have said, they appear 
to be independent of the common hours. As if a 
man were lifted out from among the looms of time, 
above their rush and din, into the calm presence 
of the Eternal. It may be so. God has wondrous 
power to lift us out of ourselves, to set the naked 
spirit before His face ; but the man has already 
settled it in his quiet years of wandering whether, 
like the Israel of the old generation, he shall sink 
clown from that lofty height to grovel among the 
fleshpots, or whether that moment of vision shall 
lift his whole life nearer to heaven and to God. 

And much of the work of these quiet hours will 
never appear on earth. It lies deep down in the 
very framework of the being ; or is gathered as 
nourishment around its germ — the albumen of the 
seed of the everlasting future. Much discipline 
appears to be wasted even in God's elect pilgrims. 
Had we seen that host as they approached the 
term of their wanderings, I doubt if we should 
have estimated them as God estimated them — fit 
for a conquest and a kingdom. Much of the work 
was done in them, is done in us, where no eye 
sees it but God's. The deeper it lies, the less it 
often shows on the surface. The exterior habits 
of the life, and the customs of the dull, unheavenly 
world, may hide for awhile much of the fruit of 



" THE WANDERINGS." 



the long wilderness discipline from every eye but 
His. But let a great crisis come, let the trumpet 
sound for some great battle, let the giant hosts be 
marshalled to hold the entrance to the promised 
land, and then all earth, all heaven, shall see 
how much has been gained. The soul, braced 
by its obscure years of discipline, shakes off the 
tatters of its desert dress, and the tricks of its 
desert life, and stands erect, compact, with armour 
bright and trenchant sword, the resistless heir of 
the kingdom, the fell foe of the devil and his 
works. And then shall the way of God be justi- 
fied by its issues — then shall the wisdom of God 
be magnified in His sons. 

Would to God, brethren, that I could convey 
to you the earnestness of my conviction that 
these obscure moments are the parents of the 
ages ; that when we least think it we are edifying 
our eternity. These are the tiny insects which, 
with constant toil, are building the structure of 
the palace of the soul. The finer touches, the 
higher expressions, may be impressed in the 
critical moments ; but the great substance out of 
which the individual features grow, and of which 
they are the revelation, you are fabricating day 
by day in your daily marches on the common 
levels of life. I am persuaded that, were our 
senses fine enough, we should see how that ex- 



THE COMMON LEVELS OF LIFE. 333 

pression of feature which is the man's charac- 
teristic, runs through every atom of him ; not 
otherwise is it with the expression of the higher 
life. 

I have spoken of Israel here as a unity. I 
have hut touched lightly on the fact that one 
generation perished, and another was trained in 
the wilderness for conquest. For the nation is a 
unity, and as a unity we are bound to treat it ; it 
is the nation which is doctrinal to us. The 
nation was driven forth into the wilderness to its 
temptations ; the nation was trained there for 
Canaan and rest. Each generation has those 
who fall and those who endure ; and that means 
very largely, those who are reverent and those who 
are contemptuous of their daily lives. Despise 
the moments, young spirit, and the years will 
avenge it ; and your carcase, when the wander- 
ings are over, will lie and rot in the waste. 
Honour the moments, the years, the ages will 
reward it ; and God will crown that faithfulness 
with the fadeless crown in the day of the mani- 
festation of His sons. 



334 pisgah: the visions. 



Pisgah : The Visions. 

" And Moses went up from the plains of Moab into the 
mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against 
Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land.'"' — Dent, 
xxxiv. 1. 

God help us, if there is to be no open vision ! 
no glimpses of what lies above and beyond the 
darkness and dulness of our world ! The soul 
can live on little, but it must have its taste of 
the food of angels ; it can hope against hope, but 
it must have its vision, however rarely, to refresh 
its sight. A path which never rises above the 
dreary level of its wilderness march, ends at last 
in madness or paralysis. It is the mountain 
summits which make " the pastures" bearable. 
If the common hours, the monotonous daily 
rounds, are building life's fabric as we have seen, 
these moments of vision add the head- stones of 
beauty and the touches of grace. The solid 
substance of the structure is the work of the 
busy, undistinguished moments ; but the plan was 
drawn in some brief hour which concentrated the 



PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 335 

thought and emotion of a lifetime, which other 
suns than that which quickens this world lighted, 
and other voices than those which make the hum 
of this world's business filled. 

We belong to two worlds. Neither the one 
nor the other completes our life. It is the action 
and reaction of their influences, the intermingling 
of their currents, which ministers to our vital pro- 
gress. But if the one world claims us chiefly in 
quantity, and ninety-nine out of every hundred 
of our moments are given to undistinguished duty, 
the one in which we rise into the clear celestial 
atmosphere, and sweep the eagle eye of the spirit 
round the horizon of a wider world, is intense in 
proportion, and loads itself with some divine 
nectar wherewith to sweeten the bitterness of our 
common cup, or rather fills itself, like the face 
of Moses, with a glory which shines on in the 
glooms of the lower world. Who does not pity 
the man, with a pity from which it is hard to 
exclude a touch of scorn, who is content, if con- 
tent be not too divine a name, to plod the mill- 
round with a constant brute -like regularity of 
motion ; what men call a life of " action," if 
that is worthy of the name of action which is 
uncheered by vision, unlit by hope. 

And whence is the hope to spring ? If the 
daily trudge through the monotonous pastures be 



336 pisgah: the visions. 

all that is open to us — if to eat, to drink, to 
march, to sleep, be the brief chronicle of every 
life — man is already at the end of all that life 
can offer. Worlds in fee could not help him ; 
oceans of pleasures, and an appetite to compass 
them — there is a near end to all that ; and you 
will soon hear a passionate cry that the end may 
come soon, "Let us die, and have done with 
this beggarly world for ever." It is, it must 
be, in what is lying beyond his sight and touch 
that the springs of hope are opened for man. 
In some world — is there such a world ? — where 
he may touch with the finer senses of his being 
the realities of which the shadows only mock him 
here ; where the bliss for which the inner organs 
ache, sometimes to desperation, may be tasted — 
full deep draughts which satisfy even a spirit ; 
where the soul's demands shall be met with full 
satisfaction, and the soul's elections shall be 
ratified eternally. These moments of vision are 
the answer. Get thee up, God-led, into thy moun- 
tain summit — it rises there close by thy wilderness 
path — and satiate thine eye with the vision of the 
glorious land. It lies there swimming in the sun- 
light ; the very air seems to palpitate with joy ; 
rivers, plains, soft mountain ranges, gleaming 
meadows, fair white cities, lakes that flash like 
gems, and mountain crests that glow like crowns 



pisgah: the visions. 337 

— it lies there beneath thee, softer, more lustrous, 
as earth is ever from mountain summits, than 
even thy dreams. And it is thine ; thy heritage ; 
thine for ever. Gaze, drink thy fill, stretch every 
sense to grasp the vision, and then rest awhile ; 
rest, till God calls thee. Not here, not now, 
canst thou possess it ; soon the dark rolling river 
shall be breasted ; one struggle, one gasp, one 
plunge as into an unknown abyss — thou art there. 
A being of two worlds ! Oh ! for some law of 
just subordination ; some truth which shall strike 
justly the balance of their conflicting claims ; 
some power of life, which shall extract by its 
potent chemistry the saps and juices with which 
the soil of earth can furnish us, while it lifts the 
divine part into diviner regions, and unfolds the 
beauty, and exhales the fragrance of our nobler 
nature in the air of its native spiritual world. 
The two worlds were more one in Eden than 
they have ever been since, or can ever be again, 
until the very memory of Eden is lost in the 
transcendent glory and bliss of heaven. Adam 
lived a simple life, we a double. His whole 
faculty exercised itself serenely on the visible 
around him, in calm intercourse with nature and 
with God. Sense, imagination, spirit, were all 
satisfied ; at least as far as they were developed. 
Adam in Eden was still an undeveloped man. 

22 



338 pisgah; the visions. 

In the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, the 
developed man, the complete image of God, 
alone appears. But to Adam it was not strange 
that the voice of the Lord God should be heard 
amidst the trees of the garden in the cool of 
the day : when he had fallen out of the pristine 
harmony by sin, then it became awful. Then, 
for the first time, he felt, what has been the 
source of the keenest suffering, but at the same 
time the school of the divinest discipline, to his 
children in all ages, that he belonged to two 
worlds which had lost their harmony; which 
would battle for the possession of his nature ; 
whose conflicts, too, would be the torment, but 
also — for was not God on one side ! — the hope of 
his life. And now there are two worlds, two 
natures : how to marry them is the one great 
question ; how of the twain to make one flesh. 
The world around man has fallen out of harmony 
with the highest in man. He is strongly beset 
by the temptation to divide himself, and give 
himself part to one, part to the other world. 
To let the daily round, the common task, have 
the share which they claim of his time and 
energy, in dull submission to the inevitable ; and 
then to live what he calls his life in another, it 
may be a higher, but, alas .! it tends terribly to 
become a lower, world. 



PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 839 

In niy last discourse I spoke of these common 
levels. I asked why our loving Father has bound 
us thus tightly by the yoke of duties which dis- 
tress and afflict us ; which seem to consume our 
whole life in tasks which yield us none of the 
higher satisfactions, and in which it is often 
impossible to find any vital interest at all. And 
I asserted that there is but one answer. It is 
this daily round which makes life : and God will 
have us live. Therefore He keeps us there. He 
will have us put interest into them, if we cannot 
find it in them. He will have us, through these 
long, weary marches, work godly principles of 
action into the vital texture of our being; and 
by the daily reiteration of endeavour, the daily 
exercise of vigilance, the daily play of the muscles 
and organs of the inner man, in the effort to 
make each humble act and passion of our lives 
harmonious with the will of God, dignify and 
finally glorify life. 

This is the meaning of our El Till— the wan- 
derings. The daily, hourly repetition of heavenly 
acts and efforts is training us for the life of heaven. 
But we are weak and dim of sight. " Wh& is 
sufficient for these things ?■'" we cry. Who can 
realize this ideal of a daily life ? Not one of us, 
alas! The idea, " the glory of God," of which 
we all come short in all things, is ever above us, 

22—2 



340 PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 

far, far above us ; but those, methinks, realize 
most of it who know most what the mountain of 
vision means ; who sometimes give loose to the 
imagination of the spirit, and suffer God to show 
them, through that organ, some glimpses of the 
things unseen, unheard, unknown, which abide 
with Him on high. 

To Moses was entrusted the noblest, but at 
the same time the weariest, life-task ever com- 
mitted to the hand of man. As a nurse with a 
sick and fractious child, he had borne through the 
life of a long generation the burden of that people's 
follies and sins. The same sensual cry, " What 
shall we eat, what shall we drink ? " was ever, 
with a few bright intervals, sounding in his ears ; 
and the dread foreboding, that the Lord in 
righteous anger would break forth on them and 
consume them, was ever weighing on his heart. 
Moses had fathomed the meaning of intercession. 
He had lived for years the life of an intercessor, 
standing between God and a faithless and sensual 
race. " Let me alone," the Lord had said, " that 
I may consume them in a moment, and I will 
make of thee a greater nation. " " Nay, my 
Lord," the father of his people had answered, 
"let me perish ; but for the glory of thine own 
name, let this nation be saved." That man had 
a right to talk of intercession. He took the 



PISGAII : THE VISIONS. 341 

burden of those whom he represented before God 
on his own heart. We utter a slight prayer for 
our fellow -men, under a passing emotion, and 
call it intercession. Let us learn from this great 
leader, type in many deep ways of the One 
Intercessor, what this awful privilege and power 
implies. History, I think, has few greater records 
than these: "And it came to pass on the morrow, 
that Moses said unto the people, Ye have sinned 
a great sin : and now I will go up unto the Lord; 
peradventure I shall make an atonement for your 
sin. And Moses returned unto the Lord, and 
said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and 
have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if Thou 
wilt forgive their sin — ; and if not, blot me, I 
pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast 
written. And the Lord said unto Moses, Who- 
soever hath sinned against me, him will I blot 
out of my book. Therefore now go, lead the 
people unto the place of which I have spoken unto 
thee : behold, mine Angel shall go before thee : 
nevertheless in the day when I visit I will visit 
their sin upon them. And the Lord plagued the 
people, because they made the calf, which Aaron 
made." — (Exod. xxxii. 30-35) . " And the Lord 
said unto Moses, How long will this people pro- 
voke me ? and how long will it be ere they 
believe me, for all the signs which I have showed 



342 PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 

among them ? I mil smite them with the pesti- 
lence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee 
a greater nation and mightier than they. And 
Moses said unto the Lord, Then the Egyptians 
shall hear it, (for Thou broughtest up this people 
in Thy might from among them ;) And they will 
tell it to the inhabitants of this land : for they 
have heard that Thou, Lord, art among this people, 
that Thou, Lord, art seen face to face, and that 
Thy cloud standeth over them, and that Thou goest 
before them, by day time in a pillar of a cloud, 
and in a pillar of fire by night. Now if Thou 
shalt kill all this people as one man, then the 
nations which have heard the fame of Thee will 
speak, saying, because the Lord was not able 
to bring this people into the land which He sware 
unto them, therefore He hath slain them in the 
wilderness. And now, I beseech Thee, let the 
power of my Lord be great, according as Thou 
hast spoken, saying, The Lord is longsuffering, 
and great of mercy, forgiving iniquity and trans- 
gression, and by no means clearing the guilty, 
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the 
children unto the third and fourth generation. 
Pardon, I beseech Thee, the iniquity of this 
people, according unto the greatness of Thy 
mercy, and as Thou hast forgiven this people, 
from Egypt even until now. And the Lord 



PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 343 

said, I liave pardoned according to thy word : 
But as truly as I live, all the earth shall be 
filled with the glory of the Lord." — Numb. xiv. 
11-21. Happy for the people that it was with 
the great Intercessor that he pleaded; that he 
spake with One who had the plea which Moses 
urged, present with overmastering force within 
His own heart ; One who bore the whole burden 
of that people's sin, the whole burden of the 
world's sin, before the righteous Father; and 
was Himself, at what cost we know, surety for 
their future, when He yielded to the prayer of 
His servant, and " pardoned according to his 
"word." The people pined for a human mediator, 
a human organ of communication between them- 
selves and God. "And the people said unto 
Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear; 
but let not God speak with us lest we die." 
How little did they understand that the Lord, 
whom they dreaded, loved them with a tender- 
ness and pitied them with a compassion, of which 
the love and pity of Moses were faint shadows — 
a love and compassion which would draw Him 
from the heart of His glory to abide with them in 
shame and suffering, and to pour out His soul 
unto death that their souls might be saved. But 
it is the cry of the human in all ages. How 
grandly does Job utter it, " For He is not a 



344 PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 

man as I am, that I should answer Him, and 
we should come together in judgment. Neither 
is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay 
his hand upon us both. Let Him take His rod 
away from me, and let not His fear terrify me ; 
then would I speak and not fear Him ; but it is 
not so with me." — Job ix. 32-35. And how finely 
does Elihu conceive of the necessary conditions 
of mediation, though too swift to conclude, in his 
fresh, young zeal, that in himself the conditions 
were fulfilled. " Behold, I am according to thy 
wish in God's stead ; I also am formed out of 
the clay. Behold, my terror shall not make thee 
afraid, neither shall my hand be heavy upon 
thee." — Job xxxiii. 6, 7. There is but One who 
can stand instead of God ; who can lay His 
hand upon us both. Elihu, and all mere human 
daysmen, retire before the dark, deep problem, 
avowedly impotent (Job xxxvii. 19, 20); He 
only can stand for us before God, and stand for 
God before us, who "was in the beginning," 
" who was with God, who was God ; " and " who 
became flesh," " bone of our bone, and flesh 
of our flesh ; " and manifested unto us the awful 
glory of the Father, full, in the human Mediator's 
countenance, of grace and truth. 

But Moses came as near as man could come 
to the conditions. A Godlike man verily, a man 



PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 345 

not afraid of suffering for men ; a man willing, 
if he might, to save men by the sacrifice of him- 
self, like God. The burden of that people he 
bore through life ; never for one instant was he 
permitted to lay it down. And to him, as to all 
such, were visions vouchsafed of diviner bright- 
ness than meaner men could look upon. It was 
when fresh from beholding the form of the glory 
of the Lord, and with the sublime word of pro- 
mise, " Doubtless I will be with thee," still ring- 
ing in his ear, that he prayed that] prayer, and 
prevailed to save that host from death. But for 
that moment of open vision he had never faced 
the drearihood of the desert ; but for that word 
of ample promise he had never borne so patiently 
their murmurs and cries of lust. The glooms of 
his daily marches were lit by the glory which still 
streamed down from that cleft of the rock on 
Sinai; and the discords that jarred around him 
were lost, were blent into some grand breadth 
of harmony, by the music of that everlasting pro- 
mise of his Lord. He had visions such as no 
other man has seen of what was behind the veil; 
for he had to do, before the veil, such work as no 
other man has done. 

And for him, as for many a faithful pilgrim, 
the brightest and most blessed vision was the 
last, from the last mountain-summit which lies on 



346 PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 

the hither side of the river of death. The long, 
long wandering of that people was over ; El Tih, 
with its dreary levels, its dusty tracks, its name- 
less stations, was behind them. Before them was 
all of which they and their fathers for generations 
had dreamed. But one man, in all the mighty 
host which stood there before the gates of Canaan, 
should never press its sod — and he their prophet 
leader; the man who for forty years had borne 
their burdens, led their marches, and been to 
them the pledge of the promised land. The hope 
of it had filled his heart through that weary pil- 
grimage, from the hour when he struck the first 
blow of deliverance in Egypt, to that in which he 
stood, with the army he had trained to order and 
hardihood, before its gates. But the word had 
gone forth, " Get thee up into this Pisgah, and 
die." Why? Because Canaan was too rich a 
reward for such a life course, or because God had 
awaiting him a better Canaan in heaven ? 

There is something profoundly touching in this 
narration of Moses : " And I besought the Lord at 
that time, saying, Lord God, Thou hast begun to 
show Thy servant Thy greatness, and Thy mighty 
hand : for what God is there in heaven or in earth, 
that can do, according to Thy works, and according 
to Thy might ? I pray Thee, let me go over, and 
see the good land that is beyond Jordan, that 



pisgah: the visions. 347 

gooclly mountain, and Lebanon. But the Lord was 
wroth with me for your sakes, and would not hear 
me : and the Lord said unto me, Let it suffice 
thee ; speak no more unto me of this matter. 
Get thee up into the top of Pisgah, and lift up 
thine eyes westward, and northward, and south- 
ward, and eastward, and behold it with thine 
eyes : for thou shalt not go over this Jordan, 
But charge Joshua, and encourage him, and 
strengthen him : for he shall go oyer before this 
people, and he shall cause them to inherit the 
land which thou shalt see." — Deut. hi. 23-28. 

" For your sakes," always, for your sakes ! 
For your sakes even I must die here, while you 
go over to possess the land. There is judgment 
here without doubt. "And Moses and Aaron 
went from the presence of the assembly unto the 
door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and 
they fell upon their faces : and the glory of the 
Lord appeared unto them. And the Lord spake 
unto Moses, saying, Take the rod, and gather 
thou the assembly together, thou, and Aaron thy 
brother, and speak ye unto the rock before their 
eyes ; and it shall give forth his water, and thou 
shalt bring forth to them water out of the rock : 
so thou shalt give the congregation and their 
beasts drink. And Moses took the rod from 
before the Lord, as He commanded him. And 



348 pisgah: the visions. 

Moses and Aaron gathered the congregation 
together before the rock, and he said unto them, 
Hear now, ye rebels ; must we fetch you water 
out of this rock ? And Moses lifted up his hand, 
and with his rod he smote the rock twice : and 
the water came out abundantly, and the congre- 
gation drank, and their beasts also. And the 
Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye 
believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the 
children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring 
this congregation into the land which I have given 
them. This is the water of Meribah ; because 
the children of Israel strove with the Lord, and 
He was sanctified in them." — Numb. xx. 6-13. 

I say there is judgment here ; but as with all 
God's judgments there is mercy behind it. There 
is always mercy in judgment here, if we will have 
it, and let God work His benignant will. There 
was judgment in the expulsion from Eden, the first 
sentence on the human race ; but to those who 
review the wilderness from the battlements of the 
heavenly city, that very expulsion will be the 
theme of an outburst of praise. In mercy to 
this man of God, this aged shepherd of Israel, 
God led him up to that summit of Pisgah, and 
showed him all the goodly land, but suffered not 
his foot to press its sods. The people entered 
that land as the Lord's avengers. As with 



PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 349 

Pompeii, as with Sodom, the land was weary of 
the vice and pollution of its people, " the land 
itself vomiteth out its inhabitants," the Lord 
said, when He put the exterminating sword into 
the people's hand.* And what had the aged 
shepherd of Israel in common with scenes of 
struggle and slaughter? The fresh young race, 
hardy, daring, braced to a nobler manhood than 
that of their sires by the discipline of the desert, 
were ready for the shock. Armed for war they 
went up, to conquer with a red right hand their 
own. But that deep-thoughted, deep-hearted old 
man, who had found the desert silences the con- 
genial comrades of his spirit, had caught the 
glow of the dawn on the mountain summits, and 
watched the dewy evenfall on the bosom of the 
parched waste for twice forty years, with an ever 
fresh wonder at the beauty and richness of His 
world who was leading Israel like a flock by His 
prophet's hand ; whose work had been the creating 
of a nation, the calling of a church, the leading 
of a great multitude into an ever closer and 
deeper knowledge of the word and the ways of 
God — let him see the goodly land, with the sun- 
glow on it, shining through the transparent air ; 
let him roam in imagination through the future 

* It is most important to bear this in mind, when considering 
the exterminating character of the Jewish warfare in Canaan. 



350 pisgah: the visions. 

scenes of the glorious life of the people he had 
loved and led ; let him sweep his gaze over the 
length and the breadth of the vision, from the 
solemn peaks of Sinai, dim there in the distance, 
to the swelling slopes of the far-off Hermon — 
where one day he should leave his mountain tomb 
to meet his transfigured Lord* — and away from 
the many-tinted mountains of Moab, on whose 
crest he stood, to the broad blue ocean sleeping 
there in the distant haze ; let him survey it all, 
let his eye behold, let his heart clasp all the 
beauty of the goodly land which had been his star 
of hope through the desert ; but let it be before 
one blood-drop stains it, before those hills give 
back one echo of the shout of infuriated foes. 

In judgment, but full of deep tenderness, his 
Father led him forth from the camp which he was 
to guide no longer. His eye was not dim, nor 
his natural force abated, as he climbed that sum- 
mit — his eye ranging with a solemn joy as he 
ascended, over fresh breadths of his promised land. 
Was the sunset glow upon it when he reached 
his resting-place ? Was the land, in that splendid 
transparent air, bathed in the lustrous sunset tones 

* I am indebted for this thought to a passage in the 
fourth volume of Mr. Buskin's Modern Painters ; in which he 
describes this mountain vision, in words which are conspicuous 
by their splendid eloquence even in his writings. 






PISGAII : THE VISIONS. 351 

of which we have all had vision sometimes, and 
dreamed of the glories of celestial worlds ? We 
know not : nor know we how, as the gloom 
settled on the vision, a darker, colder shadow fell 
around his spirit ; but this we know, the Angel of 
Death who met him there had no unwilling fol- 
lower ; the spirits who watched for the spoils of 
mortality had not long to wait for their prize. 

Something of that longing for rest, which 
seizes on the faithful servants of duty when their 
work is well nigh done, he bore with him up those 
mountain paths, where the steps of his young 
manhood had first learnt strength and swiftness, 
where his aged feet were now bearing him, how 
joyfully, to his rest. And some deep sense of the 
tenderness of His hand who had thus ordained for 
him, the perfect love of the Lord whom he should 
see at length in His glory face to face, inspired 
thanksgiving, as he prepared to pass from the 
solemn summits of that mountain world which 
had long been the sanctuary of his spirit, and in 
the sublime moment of vision, to that land of rest 
of which the Canaan at his feet was but the dim 
foreshininsr, the rest where all the faithful ones 
are at home with God, and for ever. 

There was a full depth of tenderness in the 
counsel that led him thither ; for who on earth, 
in this hard world, has realized his dreams ? 



352 pisgah: the visions. 

To him Canaan could have been but a disen- 
chantment. The Canaan of such men is to be 
found only on high. His land of promise was 
larger, fairer, more glorious, than that which lay 
basking in the sunlight at his feet. He had seen 
it through the eyes of hope, and in the light 
of the revelation of God. To tread its soil, 
abide in its cities, live with its inhabitants, whom 
his people with a fatal self-indulgence would 
spare — how fatal the narration of Bochim, in 
Judges ii.j reveals — would have been to him no 
heavenly work. He had dreamt a dream of 
Canaan, and his God took him to a world where 
alone such dreams could be fulfilled. It seems 
like a hard sentence, but we may be assured that 
his spirit rejoiced when the summons came ; as 
the mature and holy are ever glad when they 
catch the tread of the angel of death. To such, 
tempered to such fineness, purged to such pure- 
ness, earth can be but a scene of sorrowful and 
toilsome ministry ; ever, but that it is checked by 
that care for others which they have learnt of 
Christ, they have " a desire to depart and to be 
with Christ, which is far better.'' He could not 
go into that land ; no land of earth could be 
a home to such a spirit ; God's judgment was a 
merciful angel, to conduct the worn-out soldier to 
Ins eternal rest. 



PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 353 

Never had man so noble a lifework ; never had 
man so grand a burial. How, where, no man 
knoweth. Somewhere, among those clear moun- 
tain heights, they laid him ; God and the angels 
performed his obsequies ; when earth next sees 
him, he is glorified with Christ. For when the 
Lord was transfigured, " there talked with him 
two men, which were Moses and Elias, who 
appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which 
he should accomplish at Jerusalem." 

Brethren ! am I talking idly, when I talk to you 
of visions ? Have you never scaled the mountains 
that edge your wilderness, and swept your eye 
round a wider world than this ? Israel's history, 
of which the life of Moses is the core, paints in 
visible form your life. Mountains, deserts, oases, 
wastes of sand, are there in solemn, if not dread, 
reality ; but they are more dreadly real in the 
history of your lives. I know that the vision is 
not hidden from any one of you. I know that 
God will have you climb sometimes, and see some 
glimpses of what a man may be, and what, life. 
There is not an abandoned profligate who has not 
abandoned his vision to become profligate. Judas 
had once his vision — a vision of what a divine 
man might be, and a divinely governed world ; 
perhaps, it was clearest in those days when he 
first joined the Lord. There are times when 

23 



354 PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 

there breaks in, on most of us at least, an awful 
sense of the wealth of faculty with which God has 
endowed us, and the glorious beauty and richness 
of His world. It conies to us but in gleams ; 
there are those to whom the vision is ever 
present. " I never saw that in nature," said a 
critic to Turner. " I dare say not," was the 
answer ; " but don't you wish you could, though ? " 
His open eye saw what you and I can but dimly 
trace in nature ; but you and I shall see it, ay, 
and things infinitely more grand and fair, if the 
spirit, quickened by Christ, and purged by disci- 
pline, bears up its faculty to the heavenly world. 

I am not speaking here of that sense of the 
Divine presence which attends the resolute and 
earnest pilgrim, making his desert bright with 
glory, and his night-watches glad with songs. I 
am speaking of moments when the spirit grows 
intense, gathers all its force and fire, and takes a 
horoscope of its powers and its destiny. I believe 
it is oftenest in sorrow that these sublime moments 
come to us. The spirit, oppressed with its burden 
of cares, stirs itself to shake them off, and in 
shaking them off, bounds at once to the mountain 
summits of its world. And there it ranges freely ; 
it breathes a pure bright air, and sees the mists 
rolling over the scene of its wanderings, while 
above there is a clear heaven and God. There is 



pxsgaii: THE VISIONS. 355 

an essential vigour in a God- sustained soul which 
a world's burdens could not crush to annihilation. 
It exults to feel that its springs of life lie deeper, 
and rouses itself in reaction to assert and wield a 
mastery over the world; "Why should a living 
man complain?" asks Jeremiah. A living man, 
one inscribed among the living in Jerusalem. 
Why, when he has life, God, and the future ? A 
living soul ! have you never had a vision of what 
a living soul may be, may d.o, may suffer, may 
know — the infinite capacity of life. I think 
sometimes, when I study the harmonies of this 
body of ours and the creation — the exquisite con- 
cords which, even through the dull menstruum of 
our sin-thickened senses are the springs of the 
intensest joys — of the rapture with which they 
shall one day fill the spirit, when these sensual 
films are shed, and the organ comes fairly into 
contact with its world. 

I suppose that Angelo, Shakspeare, Milton, 
Turner, carried aching hearts about with them 
sometimes, when they caught the glow of a glory 
in the creation, which they could only partially 
behold. The sense of the infinite splendour, the 
glory of colour, tone, and form, of which God 
gave them vision, that they might show some 
part at least of what He had revealed to them to 
the world, saddened and oppressed them. It is 

23—2 



358 pisgah: the visions. 

a " burden of the Lord " too, which His prophets 
ever bear. Who was it who wept much when he 
beheld the vision ? It was too high, too glorious, 
for a mortal to take in. There are moments 
when the humblest of us see that the infinite 
beauty, the infinite splendour, the infinite love 
enfold us everywhere. Is the finite other than the 
portion of the infinite which we take in ? And 
those who have stretched out nearest to its bounds, 
have the most intense sense of the boundless 
beyond. It is no human culture which affords us 
this vision, which makes the soul ache and thrill, 
as the senses ache with longing for their pleasures, 
or the nerves thrill under the breath of love. 

If I wanted to find men and women who live 
much in vision, who " groan in this earthly 
tabernacle being burdened," who tremble some- 
times with an awful joy when God takes them 
aside — takes them up into His mount, and shows 
them the whole breadth of the heavenly land — I 
would rather search in the homes of the weavers 
of the Yorkshire valleys than in kings' palaces : 
among those whose patient sinewy toil has 
crowned our England with the imperial crown of 
industry, and whose daily tasks and poor sur- 
roundings show strange contrasts to the dreams 
which haunt them, finding free utterance only in 
their prayers, of what a home might be, what a 



TISGAII : THE VISIONS. 357 

kingdom might be, what a human spirit might be, 
and what a world. If we want to find prophets in 
these days — men who live near to the Eternal, and 
whose vision ranges through the Infinite — I think 
that it is among the poor of this world that they 
are chiefly to be sought. 

And perhaps a kindred reason may explain to 
us why our chief mountain of vision is on the 
hither side of the river of death. Death is pro- 
phetic. The seers who see most of the things 
unspeakable, are amongst those who are appointed 
to die. For those whom the Lord leads through 
the wilderness homewards, the last stage is a 
climbing of Pisgah. I have seen many such a 
dying, and I have rarely failed to mark, in those 
who were summoned, a sublime preparation for 
death. I have seen a light in dying eyes which 
was lit from no earthly fountain ; I have heard 
broken murmurs on dying lips, whose heavenly 
meanings no mortal brain might know; songs 
gasped out by faltering tongues already tuned to 
concord with the hymns of angels ; and smiles 
flitting over pallid, stiffening features, lighting 
up the mask of death with the likeness of the 
countenance which the departing spirit would wear 
before the Throne. 

And why do the visions cluster most thickly 
around death ? Because those who know what it 



PISGAH : THE VISIONS. 



is to live must die to realize their dreams. Like 
Moses, they may see the land, but they must die 
to inherit it — die with the vision before their 
spirits, which fades for the moment as they die, 
but when they pass, it is heaven. To recover 
Eden here is granted, thank God ! to none of us. 
There is no man living who finds earth realize his 
hope. The ease-loving pilgrim never fails to find 
his Goshen a bondage ; the man of pleasure 
never fails to find his Elysium a hell. The ex- 
citement of pursuit is grand, inspiring. "Let 
rne win this prize, let me clasp this treasure, 
my God, and I am satisfied ; ' Joy, joy for ever/ 
shall be my song in my Paradise regained." And 
where is your Paradise ? and your Eve ? You 
have struggled hard to substantiate your vision. 
" This same shall comfort us," you have said like 
Lamech, of being after being, and thing after 
thing. Wealth, knowledge, power, pleasure, 
friendship, love, all have been wooed to restore you 
Eden, and in none of them are you at rest. All 
of them have been, according to your use of them, 
either a spur, a noble stimulus to higher achieve- 
ment, or a mass of corruption, which has lain, 
since, lies still, rotting upon your soul. No ! you 
must die, to possess what your spirit touches in its 
dreams. We are long in learning this ; we fight 
hard against the stern necessity ; and we spend 






PISG-AII : THE VISIOXS. 359 

rich strength of brain and heart in realizing our 
ideal. The struggle is appointed, and the failure. 
The struggle, to brace and educate our spirits — ■ 
for the aspirations, which have shaped themselves 
into efforts here, become the habits of eternity; 
the failure, because God hath provided some 
better thing for us than our ideal, even His own, 
on high. Hope on, then, hope ever, faint pilgrim ! 
Strengthen the hands that hang down, and the 
feeble knees, and make a straight path onward 
through the desolate wastes of life. If vision 
fades, get thee up into the mountain and renew 
it, move to the music of heavenly choirs, work in 
the brightness of heavenly sunlight, rest in the 
bosom of heavenly love. Bless the hand which 
breaks up thine Edens, and shows to thee visions 
which earth must be purged and glorified to make 
real. Be strong in patience, brave in suffering, 
large, boundless, in hope. Be the pilgrim of 
Canaan, led forth into the desert by the angel of 
God's presence : not the exile of Eden driven out 
by the cherub into the waste. Brace thy soul 
for a life -long march through a desert of wander- 
ings, for a ceaseless conflict with stern and un- 
compromising foes ; but keep thine eye on that 
mountain in the distance : it lifts its solemn 
peak into the clear calm air, bathed in the light 
of some hidden celestial sun. The day cometh 



360 pisgah: the visions. 

when an unseen hand shall guide you up its 
rugged slopes, panting, trembling, but pressing 
bravely on ; the goodly land, unseen till then but 
in the mirror of hope, unfolding its breadth of 
beauty and glory as you climb ; and when at 
length, from the summit, the whole stretch of the 
field of vision is beneath you, the angel who led 
you thither shall lift you to see the worlds, of 
which the vision is but a picture, on high. 



361 



Canaan : the Rest. 

" The good land that is beyond Jordan." — Deut. iii. 25. 

It is there, a seer has seen it ; and God gave him 
words to paint the vision for us. A good land ; 
glorious in beauty, yet homelike ; familiar in every 
form and feature, but still a transfigured world. 
It is the hope that lights the way of the wilder- 
ness — the hope that we may one day behold it, 
that we may one day tread the paths and gaze 
on the glories of a creation, which has been 
" delivered from the bondage of corruption into 
the glorious liberty of the sons of God." 

If the wilderness marches of this people, which 
we have traced to the edge of Jordan, be a pic- 
ture of man's pilgrimage, the goodly land which 
is beyond the dark rolling river must have some 
pregnant suggestions of heaven. Its foreshinings 
of what God has in store for the souls He loves 
could be but dim, or Moses had been suffered to 
go over to possess it ; but they must have been 
real, or the vision of it had never so gladdened 



862 THE GOOD LAND 

and uplifted his heart. In truth, the vision is 
the best part of all earthly satisfactions. To 
those who cannot look with the inner eye on all 
the prospects of this earth, and catch the glow of 
heaven's transfiguring sunlight upon them, that 
which may be seen of earth is bare as desert and 
black as night. 

For long years this vision of Canaan had floated 
before his sight. It had led his marches through 
the wanderings, it had fed his imagination and 
filled his dreams. And the sight of the actual 
Canaan was granted. It was all of Canaan that 
was heaven-like. Imagination, not disenchanted 
by the bare and hard reality, gazed from that 
mountain brow over the splendid beauty and 
richness of the land, which spread, flooded with 
sunlight, at his feet. More like heaven to Moses 
in that hour, than even to Joshua and the heroes 
who won and held it ; more worth the quest of a 
lifetime, more able to satisfy a spirit's hope. 

To one only, the seer of the new Jerusalem, 
has a fairer vision been vouchsafed. To him 
heaven opened and the invisible appeared. He 
saw the Apocalypse of a world transfigured, as 
he had once seen transfigured the way-worn and 
tear-stained body of his Lord. 

" And I saw a new heaven and a new earth : 
for the first heaven and the first earth were passed 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN". 368 

away; and there was no more sea. And I John 
saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down 
from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride 
adorned for her husband. And I heard a great 
voice out of heaven saying, Behold the tabernacle 
of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, 
and they shall be His people, and God Himself 
shall be with them, and be their God. And God 
shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ; and 
there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain : for 
the former things are passed away." — Rev. xxi. 1-4. 

I suppose that earth needs but the heavenly 
lustre upon it to glow and shine like heaven. 
Thus Moses saw the goodly land which had been 
the dream of a lifetime, and had mingled its 
beauty as the golden thread in the texture of the 
noblest, manliest, godliest life-work ever accom- 
plished in this world. Canaan had inspired it, if 
duty had constrained it. It w r as the vision that 
gleamed there over the dim bounds of the desert 
to his prophetic sight, that lit those dreary 
marches with touches of glory, such as on mists 
that surge round the mountain peaks and steam 
down their rugged flanks, warn night-weary 
pilgrims of the advent of joyous clay. 

Brethren, it is the inspiration to all of us. The 
dullest, darkest hearts have some dim prospect 



364 THE GOOD LAND 

of a better land, which makes it easier to endure. 
None believe that the present is final. There is 
no man's life, be his creed as atheistic as it may, 
which does not, in its daily marches, toils, and 
ministries, assume the existence of the God whom 
it discredits, and the heaven which it denies. 
Legends, golden legends, among all peoples, tell 
of the heroic deeds of some divine leaders, — 
Prometheus, Krishna, Beowulf, what matter their 
names ? — who, by toil or suffering, have wrought 
deliverances for man. The idea is there, en- 
shrined in the heart of all the nobler peoples, 
and uttered in their literature — there is a sense 
in which it makes literature — and it prophesies, 
with more or less explicit tones, the advent of 
the righteous King. And men, dreaming of a 
delivered humanity, have dreamed, too, of a 
delivered world. The King who should come, 
should deliver earth as well as man — should 
reclaim its wastes, light up its gloom, and weave 
its discords into the universal harmonies which 
fill the sphere from which He came. How 
grandly does the vision of a ransomed earth 
cross the prophetic imagination of Isaiah, the 
most regal, and, therefore, the most evangelic 
of the seers. " Whereas thou hast been forsaken 
and hated, so that no man went through thee, 
I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 865 

many generations. Thou slialt also suck the 
milk of the Gentiles, and shalt suck the breast 
of kings : and thou shalt know that I the Lord 
am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty 
One of Jacob. For brass I will bring gold, and 
for iron I will bring silver, and for wood brass, 
and for stones iron : I will also make thy officers 
peace, and thine exactors righteousness. Violence 
shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor 
destruction within thy borders ; but thou shalt 
call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise. 
The sun shall be no more thy light by day ; 
neither for brightness shall the moon give light 
unto thee : but the Lord shall be unto thee an 
everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. Thy 
sun shall no more go down ; neither shall thy 
moon withdraw itself : for the Lord shall be thine 
everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning 
shall be ended. Thy people also shall be all 
righteous ; they shall inherit the land for ever, 
the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, 
that I may be glorified. A little one shall become 
a thousand, and a small one a strong nation : I the 
Lord will hasten it in his time." — Isa. lx. 15-22. 

A world, a home to dwell in, not cursed as this 
is, with all its prophetic beauty — a world without 
wastes, marshes, lava-floods, blights, famines, 
plagues — a world that shall fit a redeemed, as this 



368 THE GOOD LAND 

fits a fallen, nature — a world whose paths shall 
be the highways of angels, whose sun shall be 
the face of God. "This same shall comfort us," 
said Lamech; "concerning our work and the toil 
of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord 
hath cursed" The Deluge, as I have said above, 
was gathering then, but he saw it not : he saw 
beyond it. The cry of his heart, the cry of man's 
heart, stretched out beyond the diluvial waters, 
borne on the wings of an immortal dove. The 
hope which he uttered, the Deluge could not bury; 
the man Christ Jesus came to substantiate it ; in 
the " new heavens and the new earth, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness," the faithful shall see it 
fulfilled. 

It is easy to talk sentiment or platitude about 
heaven. It is less easy so to conceive of it, as to let 
the vision brace the muscles of a patient, manly 
life ; and yet, be it what it may, this must be its 
vestibule. A manly thoroughness in all occupa- 
tions, toils, and duties, whether of heart, mind, 
or body, must be the condition of a victorious 
entrance into the land of promise, and of a session 
on its throne. A vision which should make man 
uneasy, unquiet here, is a child's notion of a 
future, not God's. There is no uprooting, no 
transplanting, essential to God's plan for us — 
simply a growth through life to glory. 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 367 

We will strive to climb our Pisgah, if we may, 
and survey the land. It will explain the past, it will 
justify the present, it will make the future more 
glorious than our dreams. It is there, close by 
us : behind the veil — a veil which the hand can 
touch ; nay, the hand of faith may lift it at any 
moment, may lift it now. There are not two 
worlds, but one, with its fore-court curtained, 
wherein, for the present, is our abode. But 
these bars of flesh are no adamantine barriers. 
Light permeates veils ; and sound. There are those 
into whose hands these words may come, on 
whose lives the light which lights the angels to 
their tasks is calmly shining, and whose ears are 
gladdened in night-watches by the echoes of 
angelic hymns ; and for us all, the fact that that 
world is there — vivid, loving, glorious — makes 
this world brighter, its tasks less hard, its sor- 
rows less intense. We may not see, nay, we 
may choose deliberately to ignore, the source 
from which our inspirations come to us ; but 
such a world of vivid life spread round us, with 
only a veil to hide it, must kindle and quicken 
us. It makes our world other than a Hades : 
like the great burning African plain beyond our 
horizon, it modulates the atmosphere of our con- 
tinent of life. There are those who could not 
drag themselves through their daily marches, if 



368 THE GOOD LAND 

they did not catch some inspiration from its 
visions ; but the great world of men, uncon- 
sciously or half-consciously, extracts or inhales 
from it something, which runs like an under-tone 
of promise through life. 

A land whose physical features should be in 
bright contrast to Egypt's monotonous plains, 
was the picture which Moses held up before that 
people's sight : and the contrast is most in- 
structive. 

"For the land, whither thou goest in to pos- 
sess it, is not as the land of Egypt, from whence 
ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed, and 
wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs : 
But the land, whither ye go to possess it, is a 
land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of 
the rain of heaven : A land which the Lord thy 
God careth for : the eyes of the Lord thy God 
are always upon it, from the beginning of the 
year even unto the end of the year. And it 
shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently 
unto my commandments, which I command you 
this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve 
Him with all your heart and with all your soul, 
that I will give you the rain of your land in his 
due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that 
thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, 
and thine oil. And I will send grass in thy fields 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 369 

for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be 
full."— Dent. xi. 10-15. 

In Egypt, man's toil is the prominent feature ; 
man made its fertility : in Canaan, God's bounty 
is the prominent feature; "It drinketh water of 
the rain of heaven." Egypt is the field in which 
a man, by a low form of labour, might exist 
amply; Canaan the home in which a man, by 
joyful concert with God, might nobly live. The 
eye of man was upon the one, and the flesh only 
was fattened by it ; the eye of the Lord was upon 
the other, and the whole manly power was nou- 
rished there, and trained to some God-like pro- 
portion ; for there were gathered up and treasured 
all the features which make the beauty, and all 
the elements which minister to the richness, of the 
world. 

"For tlio Lord thy God bringeth thee into a 
good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains 
and depths that spring out of valleys and hills ; a 
land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig- 
trees, and pomegranates ; a land of olive oil, and 
honey : a land wherein thou shalt eat bread 
without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in 
it ; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose 
hills thou mayest dig brass." — Deut. viii. 7-9. 

No vision of a land fairer, no produce of a land 
richer, than that which is presented here. But 

24 



THE GOOD LAND 



above all, the light of God upon it, the joy of 
God in blessing His people, and crowning their 
lives with His love, patent in all its expressions ; 
its beauty, a constant smile of God on His be- 
loved. Egypt is the worldly land; toil, drudge 
there, it will feed and fatten you. Canaan is the 
heavenly land; live there, it will be the noble 
theatre and home of your life. 

In treating this subject, the rest which re- 
maineth for the people of God, to the earthly 
image of which Canaan received the weary pil- 
grims of the desert, I shall speak in the first place 
of its nature, the conceptions which we are to 
form of the heavenly rest ; and, in the second 
place, of the springs of its joys. 

Its nature will, for the present, occupy our 
attention. 

I. It was a land, a good land, the slope of that 
goodly mountain, even Lebanon, which Moses 
looked upon ; it was a land of promise, which God 
had prepared. 

I believe in the heavenly land. I believe that 
we are so sublimely immaterial in these days, that 
we are prone to conceive of things invisible so as 
to touch nothing more substantial than the 
vapours of a dream. God gives us an earth like 
this to tread upon, that we may have some solid 
notions about heaven. I suppose that earth, at 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 371 

its best, must be strangely heaven-like. When 
the Lord had finished the work of creation, and 
left the earth with the glory of the last touch of His 
hand upon it, He looked upon His handiwork, 
and said, " Behold, it is very good ! " There are 
no comparatives of goodness with God. There is 
no "yea and nay" with Him. He meant that He 
had made it perfect in its beauty, perfect as His 
hand could make it ; and man, in all his ages, has 
caught the thought, and mused upon an image 
of an Eden restored. All man's imaginings about 
the world behind the veil, instinctively make an 
earth like this the starting-point. It is a trans- 
figured world which we look for — the familiar 
forms, with the heavenly sunlight on them ; the 
hints of beauty which earth suggests, wrought out 
into broad expression ; the gleams of brightness 
expanded into brilliant day ! 

Canaan was in a sense the heaven of Israel's 
hope : the more heaven-like, perhaps, because it 
was so fair a feature of our world ; because it was 
a land on which a foot could be firmly and joy- 
fully planted; a home in which a man, a family, a 
nation, could nobly dwell. A ivorld behind the 
veil is the instinctive belief of every human spirit : 
a world, with all the attributes of a world like 
this, in which all the promises of this flawed and 
fractured creation shall be realized ; wherein no 
•■- 24—2 



372 THE GOOD LAND 

hope shall be frustrated, no cord of association 
broken, which has been consecrated by holy com- 
munion upon earth. 

This is man's vision, inseparable, too, from his 
condition here. Imagination! we may say ; blank 
dreams, no more ! and pass it by. Imagination 
surely ! but who inspired the imagination ? Who 
but the Being who is the Maker of the reality, which 
He has kept, for ages, before the imagination of the 
world. I accept imagination here as a witness to 
reality. The imagination of the seer of Patmos 
was the organ by which was set before him the 
image of a divine reality — the " new heavens, and 
the new earth," wherein, saith St. Peter, " dwel- 
leth righteousness." I cling to these words, " the 
new heaven and the new earth," most earnestly. 
They are pregnant words, pregnant with heavenly 
truth. St. Peter and St. John looked for a scene 
which should be familiar, however transfigured; a 
scene which should keep its home-like character, 
however transformed. 

Heaven is a state, and not a place, we are 
assured by our present illuminati. Most surely ; 
places do not constitute spirits, but spirits places. 
And yet one may hope that heaven is a state in 
which there will be firm footing, free air, and 
room to work. God has not double types of 
created things. The one for heaven, even the 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 373 

heaven of heavens where He abides ; the other 
poorer, grosser, made in clay after commoner 
forms, for the uses of this world. God is One ; 
His thought is one. He has but one way, and 
that the way of manifesting himself in creation — 
but one idea, whose realization through infinite 
variety He ever pursues. We speak familiarly of 
the boundless varieties of form in the kingdom of 
nature, tasking the strongest brain beyond its 
powers to name and catalogue them. Naturalists 
come home from their world-wide rambles, and 
bewilder us with the list of species, till then un- 
known to fame, which they have discovered. But 
as the myriad lenses in the eye of that marvellous 
beetle form after all but one eye, so there is a 
unity underlying the variety, whose image science 
ever pursues. For science, looking under the 
cloak of the visible, discourses sagely of simplicity 
— the few primary elements out of which all things 
are developed, the simplicities of form and struc- 
ture, of which we have but slight modulations in 
all the infinite varieties of created things which 
surround us here. It was a poet's eye which first 
recovered this track of thought in the modern 
world. Goethe's suggestions, modern science still 
pursues. There is a double process at present, 
nay in all ages of scientific expansion: — the dis- 
covery of variety, and the discernment of unity. 



374 THE GOOD LAXD 

The constructive minds — the builders of the future 
— are at work earnestly upon the last. The most 
instructed believe that we are on the eve of mar- 
vellous discoveries of the unity of nature, or 
rather disclosures — for it is a thing to be seen 
with the inner eye, not hunted after by the under- 
standing — and that, ere long, the scientific world 
will substitute the word unity for simplicity, and 
discern with awe — for these unities are the awful 
things in nature — how one thought runs through 
the whole scale of the visible universe, and seems 
to prolong itself, as far as we can trace it, into 
the invisible beyond. And I mean to affirm, that 
St. Peter was not stooping to our weakness, and 
helping us by an image which we do know, to an 
invisible of a diverse nature, which is beyond our 
range ; but was describing what is, what must be, 
when he says, that as there are heavens and earth 
around us here, so there must be new heavens 
and a new earth around us there, struck from the 
same moulds, though in more heavenly substance, 
according to the pureness of the things and beings 
which abide in God's eternal heaven: — 

" Seeing then that all these things shall be 
dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be 
in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for 
and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, 
wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dis- 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 375 

solved, and the elements shall melt with fervent 
heat ? Nevertheless we, according to His promise, 
look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein 
dwelieth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, see- 
ing that ye look for such things, be diligent that 
ye may be found of Him in peace, without spot 
and blameless." — 2 Peter hi. 11-14. 

One is sickened sometimes, at least I frankly 
confess that I am, by the vague and vapid concep- 
tions of a heaven with which many delight them- 
selves, whose chief business upon earth seems 
to be to rail at it, or, like priest and Levite, pass 
it by, with upturned eye and hand, on the other 
side. Everything which is not here, nothing 
which is here, seems to be their aspiration : 
as if God had made the world at random or 
angrily; or as if the devil had been strong enough 
to undo and remould God's constitution of things 
below ! The world is a good world ; goodly as 
Canaan was — beautiful, heavenly, glorious, were 
but God in it as He walked in Eden. It is a 
light which has gone from it, and a veil has fallen 
on its beauty ; but it is just the glory that gleams 
through the veil, whieh makes us pine and sigh for 
its lifting as a revelation of heaven. Moses saw 
it lifted, from Pisgah's crest. He saw in Canaan 
what none who trod its sod could find. We may 
well believe that there was a glory upon it to 



378 THE GOOD LAND 

his dying eye, such as the dying only can discern 
here, for 

" To death it is given 
To see how this earth lies embosomed in heaven." 

I often think that the removing of the taber- 
nacle outside the camp, after the dark idolatry of 
the people — that is, the moving of the visible 
symbol of God's presence out from the midst of 
them, not to abandon them to their fate, but, as 
it were, to watch and guide them from a distance, 
— is a picture of the God-forsaken, but not God- 
abandoned, world of sin. Let me beg of you to 
consider this passage carefully : it casts much 
light on man's history, in every age and clime. 
" And the Lord said unto Moses, Depart, and go 
up hence, thou and the people which thou hast 
brought up out of the land of Egypt, unto the 
land which I sware unto Abraham, to Isaac, and 
to Jacob, saying, Unto thy seed will I give it : 
and I will send an angel before thee ; and I 
will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, and 
the Hittite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and 
the Jebusite : unto a land flowing with milk 
and honey : for I will not go up in the midst of 
thee ; for thou art a stiff-necked people : lest I 
consume thee in the way. And when the people 
heard these evil tidings, they mourned : and no 
man did put on him his ornaments. For the 



THAT IS BEYOND JOKDAN. S77 

Lord had said unto Moses, Say unto the children 
of Israel, Ye are a stiff-necked people : I will come 
up into the midst of thee in a moment, and con- 
sume thee : therefore now put off thy ornaments 
from thee, that I may know what to do unto thee. 
And the children of Israel stripped themselves of 
their ornaments hy the mount Horeb. And Moses 
took the tabernacle, and pitched it without the 
camp, afar off from the camp, and called it the 
Tabernacle of the Congregation. And it came to 
pass, that every one which sought the Lord went 
out unto the tabernacle of the congregation, which 
was without the camp. And it came to pass, when 
Moses went out unto the tabernacle, that all the 
people rose up, and stood every man at his tent 
door, and looked after Moses, until he was gone 
into the tabernacle. And it came to pass, as 
Moses entered into the tabernacle, the cloudy 
pillar descended and stood at the door of the 
tabernacle, and the Lord talked with Moses. And 
all the people saw the cloudy pillar stand at the 
tabernacle door : and all the people rose up and 
worshipped, every man in his tent door."- — Exod. 
xxxiii. 1-10. 

Have we not here the relations of church and 
world symbolized ? God's idea, a world-church — 
a world which should be also a church — is sym- 
bolized in this called nation : while man's sin, 



378 THE GOOD LAND 

man's inability to dwell with Grod, drives the 
Shekinah outside the camp — the church sepa- 
rates itself from the world. Not forsaking it ; 
watching it, blessing it, attracting it, consecrating 
it ; but still as a thing apart, and to remain apart, 
too sadly, till the great consummation day. Here 
we have, in the Jewish camp, in the nation 
which was called to be a church, an outer circle 
of observers, and an inner circle of communicants 
with God ; a sorrowful picture of what our world 
remains, after eighteen centuries of Diviner teach- 
ing than that which the Jews broke loose from, of 
more sacred Divine Presence than that which the 
Jews despised. The glory was gone forth from the 
midst of them, it shone on them from afar. All 
else remained in the camp as before ; the organi- 
zation, the supplies, the tables of the Law, the 
miraculous guidance, were all there still, and all 
unimpaired. New tables speedily replaced the 
old — but they were hewn this time by the hand 
of Moses ; here too the same idea reigns. 
Everything which was essential to the life and 
progress of the nation remained untouched, but a 
glory had departed ; a glory was gone from 
above them, and a joy from within them — for 
when the people heard these evil tidings, they 
mourned ; and the world mourns still — which 
would have made their dreariest stations in the 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 379 

desert as Edens, and would have forecast in the 
wilderness the beauty, brightness, and blessed- 
ness of their promised land. It is just this glory, 
this visible Divine Presence, which has been 
driven out of our world by sin. 

And I am well assured that among our visions, 
when for us the veil is lifted, will be, what earth 
had been, undeflowered by evil. The loving 
study of the forms in which the idea of God 
takes shape around us here, qualifies us to know 
and to enjoy them everywhere. He who sees 
most what earth is — as God makes nothing at 
random, nor otherwise than according to Him- 
self — will see most of what heaven is, when, 
passing through the veil, the new heaven and the 
new earth are disclosed. The men who learn 
most reverently the lore of the world around 
them — and none but the reverent can learn it, 
Nature unveils not before those who deny her 
Lord — are the elect masters of the higher school. 
The wise here are the wise for ever, for to be 
wise is not simply to know ; wisdom takes cog- 
nizance of what is common to the two worlds. 
Nothing which has been truly, reverently, learnt 
will need to be unlearnt ; no new education will 
be necessary for the infants of the new creation 
who have learnt on earth their lessons well. 
Angelo's hand will not need to forget its cunning, 



380 THE GOOD LAND 

Newton's brain its vision of the universe, Dante's 
conscience its ideal of a state — he has found his 
"Monarchia" on high. The stars do not die when 
we die, nor perhaps the flowers. Strains, not 
unfamiliar to the ear that is versed in harmony, 
have streamed down on the earthly auditors of 
angelic choirs. The faithful students of God's 
hand in the visible, are learning to know His 
mind through the whole sphere of the invisible ; 
they are familiar here with the things which the 
angels desire to look into ; and pass at once from 
the training-school of the Spirit into the inner 
circle, the elect spirits which are next the throne. 
" A goodly land beyond Jordan." A real, sub- 
stantial, homelike world. 

II. The images which are employed by the 
sacred writers as most expressive when they are 
treating of heaven, are all borrowed from the 
higher forms of the development of man's social 
and national life. 

This means, that the human interests and asso- 
ciations prolong themselves in their integrity 
through death, and constitute the highest sphere 
of interest and activity in the eternal world. 
A home, a city, a country, a kingdom — these are 
the images ; on the working out of these ideas 
the writers of the Scripture spend all their force. 
Men in societies most perfectly developed, the 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 381 



fellow-subjects of a king who can rule them ; 
this, to the seers, is the picture which fills the 
field of eternity. " Let not your heart be 
troubled : ye believe in God, believe also in Me. 
In my Father's house are many mansions : if it 
were not so, I would have told you. I go to 
prepare a place for you. And if I go to pre- 
pare a place for you, I will come again, and 
receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there 
ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, 
and the way ye know." — John xiv. 1-4. 

" For they that say such things declare plainly, 
that they seek a country. And truly, if they had 
been mindful of that country from whence they 
came out, they might have had opportunity to 
have returned. But now they desire a better 
country, that is, an heavenly : wherefore God is 
not ashamed to be called their God : for He hath 
prepared for them a city." — Heb. xi. 14-16. 

"For He looked for a city which hath foun- 
dations, whose builder and maker is God." — 
Heb. xi. 10. 

It is not too much to say, that God's great 
universe has been built as a theatre for the deve- 
lopment of man's life. The creation teems with 
life, beings rational and irrational, of infinite 
ranks and orders ; but in the centre of them all, 



382 THE GOOD LAND 

the earth around which they arrange themselves 
as moons, stands man, himself the moon of a 
more central sun. We know little of the angels ; 
nothing but that they are, and that they are 
ministers. We are intended to know but little ; 
yet this we know full surely, the human and not 
the angelic is the dominant tone through all the 
spheres of the invisible world. That nature which 
He bore as His own who is the Lord of Angels, is 
the key to all the concords of the universe ; the 
human through Christ underlies the universal 
developments of life. The angelic is ministrant 
to the human, attends it, and will attend it, 
through eternity. The man who has been trained 
under the Word and by the Spirit in the wilder- 
ness of life, passes through the veil to play the 
chief part on a wider stage, to live a life which is 
the next thing in the universe to God. 

A rest from trouble is the heavenly dream of 
some of us ; to lie in the bosom of the celestial 
sereneness, as on a downy sleeping bed, whose 
softness may soothe the strain of an overworn 
spirit, and lull, as an anodyne, the agony of a 
sorely stricken heart. But for man to rest, is to 
live. To rest in God, is to enter into life. All 
images of heaven present life and its motions ; 
life in its highest strain, under its heaviest obliga- 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 383 

tions, in its most earnest activity, its most un- 
selfish and, therefore, most satisfying joys. It is 
the organization of men which is the leading fea- 
ture of the life of the city or the kingdom ; the 
discovery of the relations and duties which man 
sustains and owes ; the stimulating his loftiest 
powers by the magnet of association ; the con- 
cert of developed intellects, the emulation of 
noble and fertile hearts. The life of men in their 
societies is like a hotbed to their natures ; the 
virtues and the vices start under its heat. But 
there, where vice, if rampant, is most corrupting, 
where wrong, if unchecked, is most destructive, 
where selfishness, if untamed, is most blighting, 
where the devil, if unconquered, reigns most 
deadly unto death, there, in the thick and throng 
of life, is the field of man's noblest and purest 
activities : in killing that vice, in righting that 
wrong, in curbing that selfishness, in mastering 
that devil there, he finds the field of his grandest 
victories ; and there, where the throng is densest, 
where the fight is hottest, he is most completely 
in training for the ruling of his Father's kingdom 
on high. 

Hearts weary of the woe and wrong of the life 
of great cities, and of the vice and selfishness 
which breed fast in all throngs of men, look 
longingly to heaven, with a sentiment not much 



THE GOOD LAND 



higher than that which moved a world-sick poet 
to cry for a desert, 

" Where he might all forget the human race ! " 

"A lodge in some vast wilderness!" cried another 
heart- weary one. Anywhere, away from man. 
Heaven ! The world where earth, with all its 
storm and strife may he forgotten ; alone with 
the quiet angels, within the tranquil sphere of 
the serene activity of God. 

Nothing like this was Canaan ; nothing like 
this will he heaven. It is the sphere in which 
the elect spirits who have won the prizes in life's 
battles, who have come forth from the chaos of 
strife, trained, inured, yet pure, shall play out 
their parts on a grander scale, in a wider theatre, 
under the eye of a more absolute and exigent 
King. All that society on earth aims at and 
misses, the grand order of human relations, the 
majestic procession of human activities, of which, 
marred and crippled as they are on earth, the 
wisest and noblest have not ceased to dream, 
shall there be realized ; with Christ the King 
visibly in the centre of it, and the angels atten- 
dant to watch the actors and applaud the results. 

I know not why we should hesitate to believe 
that man, and the life of his world, lies on the 
threshold of the higher developments of being ; 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 385 

that God's universe has to he peopled with God- 
like heings through us. All that we know of the 
universe shows man the chief actor in its higher 
occupations. The angels come, manlike, to talk 
with us ahout man's interests. Gabriel, Michael, 
stand for the ward and government of provinces 
of the human world. The veil has been lifted, 
and out of the ineffable splendour, which no 
unpurged human eye could look upon, this form 
appeared as the fountain of all power, the seat of 
all dominion, through all the spiritual spheres. 

" And I turned to see the voice that spake with 
me. And being turned, I saw seven golden can- 
dlesticks ; and in the midst of the seven candle- 
sticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with 
a garment down to the foot, and girt about the 
paps with a golden girdle. His head and His hairs 
were white like wool, as white as snow ; and His 
eyes were as a flame of fire ; and His feet like 
unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace ; 
and His voice as the sound of many waters." — 
Kev. i. 12-15. 

And lest it should be thought that the human 
is here accidental, a dress assumed for a time and 
for a purpose, to be laid aside as soon as the end 
was gained, a fuller vision was disclosed. 

" And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the 
throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of 

25 



386 THE GOOD LAND 

the elders, stood a lamb as it had been slain, 
having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the 
seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth. 
And He came and took the book out of the right 
hand of Him that sat upon the throne. And when 
He had taken the book, the four beasts and four 
and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, 
having every one of them harps, and golden vials 
full of odours, which are the prayers of saints." 
— Eev. v. 6-8. [Read to the end of the chapter.] 

There the very form of the human sufferer was 
shown in the very heart of the glory of the central 
throne ; and the love which wrestled on Calvary 
for a world's redemption, and triumphed through 
death, becomes the chosen theme of celebration, 
not to ransomed humanity, but to the myriad 
angelic hosts " for ever and ever." 

It is easy to talk idly on themes of such mag- 
nitude and distance; but thus much, surely, the 
Scriptures seek to express to us, that heaven and 
earth are related much as the theatre of life, the 
great world, is to the little world of the school- 
boy, where he has to practise the part and train 
himself for the station, which he is to fill in the 
day of his developed life. The faculty educated, 
the energy disciplined, the wisdom acquired, the 
patience exercised, the charity touched to its 
finest issues, in that life of man on earth 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 387 

in which man is in closest contact with man, 
under the heaviest obligations of duty, with the 
largest vocation to ministry, and the keenest 
stimulus to energy ; these are the qualities 
which Heaven welcomes to its theatre — this is 
the life which is the training-school for the 
thrones of God's kingdom on high. All which 
makes schism between your most active and 
energetic life as men here, and your vision of 
what awaits you there, dishonours earth and 
heaven equally. The Lord, the King there, is 
King of both worlds. He sets you your tasks 
in this, your commonest as well as your highest ; 
not that He may disgust you with earth to make 
heaven sweeter, but that he may so train your 
faculty as to make heaven richer, its life more 
fruitful, more noble, more glorious, through eter- 
nity. And I dare to say, of some of your dreariest 
wanderings, the years which you have spent over 
your commonest and weariest tasks, you will 
never understand them, you will never see how 
precious their ministry has been to you, till you 
have grown familiar with the life and occupation 
of God's eternal Kingdom of Heaven. 

III. That good land beyond Jordan had some 
heaven-like feature herein ; it was to be the 
theatre of the highest and holiest human asso- 
ciation, under conditions most favourable to the 

25—2 



388 THE GOOD LAND 

most perfect development ; and in an atmosphere 
of life which God's benediction should make an 
atmosphere of bliss. 

Canaan was nothing like this, you will be 
ready to answer. Alas ! no. For the most part 
the very reverse of all this. And yet the picture 
of what a life in Canaan might be, is not a man's 
dream, but God's. His Spirit dictated these 
words. " If ye walk in my statutes, and keep 
my commandments, and do them ; then I will 
give you rain in due season, and the land shall 
yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall 
yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach 
unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach 
unto the sowing time : and ye shall eat your 
bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. 
And I will give peace in the land, and ye shall 
lie down, and none shall make you afraid : and 
I will rid evil beasts out of the land, neither shall 
the sword go through your land. And ye shall 
chase your enemies, and they shall fall before 
you by the sword. And five of you shall chase 
an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put 
ten thousand to flight : and your enemies shall 
fall before you by the sword. For I will have 
respect unto you, and make you fruitful, and 
multiply you, and establish my covenant with 
you. And ye shall eat old store., and bring 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 



forth the old because of the new. And I will 
set my tabernacle among you : and my soul 
shall not abhor you. And I will walk among 
you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my 
people. I am the Lord your God, which brought 
you forth out of the land of Egypt, that ye should 
not be their bondmen ; and I have broken the 
bands of your yoke, and made you go upright." — 
Levit. xxvi. 3-13. 

A model human society we have here ; not 
reduced to its simplest elements, as in Abraham's 
patriarchal tent, but developed into its highest 
form as a nation and a church, and dwelling in 
a model earthly home. This was the vision 
which was before the mind of the great leader, 
the mind of the people in a measure, and the 
mind of God ; who alone saw when and how it 
should be real. In the rich variety of the 
physical features of the land, they had all 
which could educate the eye and charm the 
imagination, all that could draw out the patriotic 
passion, and add richness and compass to their 
hymns ; all that could make life rich as life could 
be in variety and interest was around them there 
— how the eye of their seer flashed as he gazed 
on it all from his mount of vision — faint image, 
with all its splendour, of the infinite variety and 
richness of the homes that await us in heaven. 



390 THE GOOD LAND 

While within the bosom of the community was 
all out of which could spring a national life of 
conspicuous glory and entrancing joy. This is 
joy, this is glory, to dwell nobly, purely, faithfully 
with men, under the smile of God. A called 
nation, known to the great Grod by name, each 
one of them, and marked by Him with a seal 
which, while they overlaid it not, nature reve- 
renced and the angels ; with homes guarded by 
the most sacred sanctions, and enriched by the 
most ample benedictions ; a government on the 
one heavenly model, the rule of the wisest and 
ablest, the secret of finding whom earth has not 
discovered yet ; and worship which, while it 
exercised, expanded quite infinitely the highest 
powers of their being — here is the material and 
home of a life which that people by faithlessness 
brought down to shameful beggary and pitiful 
straits, but which the children of the kingdom, 
who have succeeded to their lost inheritance, are 
trained here to live out under the shadow of the 
sceptre of the Son of David,, the Divine Man, in 
heaven. 

Expansion, development, in purer and yet 
purer forms, of the manifold sympathies, affec- 
tions, intelligences of man, the faculty of his 
body, brain, and heart, is the key to the prepara- 
tions of this training school of the Spirit, who 



THAT IS BEYOND JORDAN. 891 

is the one Purifier and Educator of men. While 
life, large, free, royal life — life that can manifest 
what is most divine in God, after the image of 
Him who is His image — life is the key to the 
rest of heaven. 



392 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 



•trmoix %vi 

The Everlasting Joy. 

" Everlasting joy shall be unto them." — Isaiah lxi. 7. 

In my last discourse I considered the nature and 
conditions of the heavenly rest — the rest of the 
human spirit in a world which is capable of being 
the theatre of its developed life. A spirit rests 
only in the full sweep of its orbit around the Being 
who is its sun. In order to complete the subject 
which I have treated in these pages, I must speak 
now of the springs of its everlasting joy. The 
advent of the Lord opened these springs of ever- 
lasting joy for man. To share His life is to share 
His eternal joy. But here we taste that joy but 
sparingly. The Christian life is less a being than 
a becoming ; we are growing up into Christ ; we 
are learning to live in Him. The world and the 
flesh have their springs of pleasure, and tempt us 
to their Marahs. Who can say with the Psalmist, 
" All my springs are in Thee ? " We find bitter 
waters where we looked for joys unspeakable ; 
warned, we seek the true fountain, and some 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 393 

foretaste of the everlasting joy of the blessed 
uplifts our hearts. But we pore with intense 
earnestness over the words which picture the joys 
of the future ; we pant with passionate longing 
for the fruit of the tree and the draught of the 
river which were shown to the seer of the Apoca- 
lypse — the vision of which, in all ages, has lit 
with hope man's wilderness life. The joy is there. 
" Everlasting joy unto them.'* Let us consider 
what are its springs. I shall dwell on three — the 
three chief satisfactions — the purest springs of 
joy for the human spirit, intellect, and heart. 

I. The inward harmony, the perfect order of 
the being, the concert of every faculty and every 
force in the fulfilment of the will of God. That 
is the peace of God — the perfect peace. More 
exquisite is it to the imagination of the racked 
and tormented spirit which is in arms " against 
a sea of troubles," and a host of rebellious 
powers, than is the haven to the mariner storm- 
tossed on the dark rough ocean, or — 

" To those wild eyes that watch the wave 
In roarings round the coral reef," 

the vision of peaceful and blessed home. 

God, my Eedeemer ! There is but one re- 
demption possible for man — restoration to the 
rule of his rightful King. The redeemed man is 
the governed man ; the man who has re-found the 



394 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

King who can evoke his loyal passions, and control 
and direct his manifold powers. This rule, the 
rule of his true King, has been lost to him through 
sin. This supreme, complete control of his being 
heaven will restore. The inward strife is the real 
agony of the spirit. Let a man be at peace 
within, at one with himself and God, and worlds 
have no power to harm or torment him. He 
may slumber calmly — as the Lord on that pillow, 
drenched with the spray of the storm — through 
the fiercest shocks of the wildest tempests ; give 
him inward unity, he is at rest; God's rest, God's 
peace, reigns within. " Who is he that shall 
harm you if ye be the followers of the good One ? " 
But who is at one with himself? Who that is 
in earnest about the Divine life does not litter 
and re-echo that most profound and pregnant of 
prayers, "Unite my heart to fear Thy name?" 
Now it is all at war. There are hostile camps 
within me, and deadly strifes. Flesh and spirit, 
mind and conscience, heart and reason, all 
jangled and at discord ; each contending fiercely 
for the supreme rule of my spirit, and rending my 
very being in sunder by their mad war. They 
have broken loose from their true monarch, and 
have fallen under a tyrant, who exaggerates their 
discords and inflames their hate. 

The tyrant is simply the wrong king ; the king 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 395 

who commands no reverence, kindles no loyalty, 
constrains no obedience, quickens no love ; the 
king whom the revolted powers have accepted as 
lord in the tumult of passion, but who wields no 
authority, and makes no order in the distracted 
state. The wildest and most desperate endea- 
vours have been made by the earnest in all ages 
to reduce the confusion to order, the discord to 
concord, or even the semblance of it. Simeon 
Stylites was at work on the problem up there 
upon his pillar ; St. Bernard there, fainting with 
exhaustion and vigil in his cell : they said, as 
myriads of brave hearts have said, it is worth 
while to endure all this, which would drive the 
dullest and most patient of brutes to seek the 
exodus of suicide, ay, and far more than this, 
if by the maceration of the flesh the seeming even 
of unity may be realized within : it is worth 
while to torture the flesh as no demon of cruelty 
ever ventured to torture a fellow, if it can be 
tamed into submission; if the spirit may be 
restored to its rightful supremacy, even by the 
murder of that flesh which was given into its 
bosom to live with it as its bride. 

But no force of will ever compacted this unity : 
nor can the maiming or crippling of our being in 
any province or organ, be the way into the peace 
of God. To find the king of the whole being 



396 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

is the one secret of unity; to find the centre of 
its system, the lord of its life. An unsphered 
planet could be won back to the harmony of its 
sister planets, only by the attraction of their com- 
mon sun. The King has appeared and claims His 
own. To feel that He has His own, that we are 
His, His wholly, His for ever, will be the deepest 
spring of the bliss of heaven. He has laid His 
touch upon us, and the disorderly troop of rebel 
and vagrant powers see the eye and feel the hand 
of a master, and tremble. There is a stir and 
mutual motion, as in the valley of dry bones in 
the prophet's vision ; Chaos is growing into Cos- 
mos ; the inward world is settling into peace. 

But just as the recovery of the body from a 
torpor of faintness is an exquisite agony, so there 
is fearful heartache over this reorganizing process 
in the soul. Men who have been half killed tell 
us that the coming to life again is the keenest 
suffering. It is this coming to life which is the 
pain of the present ; the sensation of life will be 
the bliss of the future. But for the present it is a 
daily dying. " Always bearing about in the body 
the dying of the Lord Jesus." And at times we 
are tempted to cry, "My God, the pain is too 
sharp, let us alone, let us back, let us die in 
torpor, anything better than this agony of nascent 
life." And it is life-long. It is the work of the 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 397 

child of God in this life to recover the possession 
of his faculty through the vital attraction of his 
Saviour, and yield it to His service ; when the 
recovery is complete, when the flood of life flows 
freely through every pulse and channel, earth be- 
comes too dark a prison-house, it is time to arise 
and to go home. Hence the experience which 
the Apostle Paul unfolds so richly in the fourth 
chapter of his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 
in which he sets forth his life as a daily death ; 
that death being the birth-throe of an inner life 
into the sphere for which it was born, and in 
which it shall abide for ever. 

Oh ! the anguish of the weary struggle against 
the lusts which we have learnt to hate, the follies 
which we have learnt to scorn, the habits which 
we have disowned, the longings which we would 
strangle to death. Oh ! the heart-ache of the 
pining for the state, in which what the soul loves 
and honours in its sanctuary shall win the love 
and homage of the whole being, and lead captive 
the troop of its appetites and lusts ; in which the 
vision of life which we see from our Pisgahs, shall 
be fouled no more by the stains of the flesh and 
the dirt of the world when we descend to its 
arena, but shall draw the whole being with its 
sweet attractions, and harmonize every power 
and passion in the work of making it real. Oh 



398 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

God ! unite us ! unite our hearts in this blest 
concert of powers ! unite them indissolubly to 
all that is good, and fair, and of Thee ! 

The vision of the beauty of the Lord when we 
pass through the veil, will be (rod's answer. We 
shall see Jesus, and, as with Paul, the unity will 
be completed, the arch will be keyed. We know 
little of heaven's occupations, the aspect of its 
homes, the modes of its speech, the forms of its 
life. We know only that the G-od-man is there, 
and reigns. That He whom we can love with 
intensest passion, and serve with exulting joy, 
will meet us on its threshold, will sweep the flood 
of His attractions round every limb and organ of 
our being, and thrill us in one intense moment 
with the sense that we are one, that we are 
blessed. To see Him, as they see Him who 
prevail to pass through death as conquerors, is 
to put off the stains and weaknesses of flesh. 
As Elijah dropped in one blest moment the gar- 
ment of mortality, the vision of Jesus shall com- 
plete the enfranchisement of our souls in death. 
A flood of divine strength shall pour through the 
languid ducts and pulses of the being. Our 
hearts shall be uplifted for ever by the sense 
that there is the power in us now to realize our 
aspirations, that we have mastered the art of 
substantiating our dreams. Tiiat clinging sense 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 399 

of infirmity, which never ceased to oppress us, 
shall drop off like the bands of slumber, at the 
first flash of that heavenly sun. Power to become 
sons, power to live like sons — this is what we 
have been pining, panting, praying for ; and 
when we see Jesus, it shall flow into us, as day- 
light floods the darkness, exhilarating the spirit 
with that most intense of all joys — the joy of 
vivid, glowing, victorious life. " The goodly land 
beyond Jordan " is good to us, because the Lord 
is there ; the Lord, whose suffering presence here 
reclaimed this earth as God's dominion ; whose 
glorious appearing, in the day of the manifesta- 
tion of the sons of God, shall be the proclamation, 
that the reconquest of man and of all things unto 
Himself is complete. One vision of the glorified 
Man, as we pass the Jordan, shall fill us with 
that joy of hope which is unspeakable and full of 
glory. What if we wait and watch awhile, that 
those who follow may pass with us into the 
perfect bliss ; the hope which the Lord sustains 
shall sustain our spirits, and fill them with a 
rapture which the heaven of heavens alone can 
complete. The very vision of His form shall be 
the assurance and the prophecy that the largest 
and deepest purposes of His love shall have com- 
plete accomplishment; the full revelation must 
await the day when the whole company of the 



400 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

redeemed shall throng the plains of the restored 
creation, and range themselves in their heavenly 
ranks and orders, not around the symbol of a 
Divine Presence, but around the glorious Person 
of Christ, the King. 

II. The full vision of the glory of God in the crea- 
tion, the beholding of all that God has meant, and 
sin has marred, in the constitution of the worlds. 

The spirit demands, as we have seen, the re- 
storation of its lost supremacy, to be blessed; 
to rule, ruled by Christ, its subject powers. There 
is that faculty in man which claims further, for 
its satisfaction, to behold the glory of God's 
universe unveiled, face to face, as a man looks 
into the face of his beloved. Of all the deadly 
legacies which theological strife has handed down 
to us, there is none deadlier than that dread of 
the study of the revelation of the mind of God 
in the creation, which infects so strangely a large 
and influential section of the Church. There is 
an infidel dread of inquiry into the visible things, 
" by which, from the creation of the world, the 
invisible things of God are clearly seen, being 
understood by the things that are made, even His 
eternal power and Godhead," which has tended 
very largely to create a miserable, mutually detri- 
mental, schism, between the Christian belief and 
activity and the intellectual life of our time. This 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 401 

fear of the study of Nature, and the observation 
of all that she can reveal to us about God, palsies 
the manhood of the godly in the Church, and 
widens continually the breach between it, and the 
world it was set to enlighten and to guide to 
salvation. 

And yet how much of the joy of life for all of 
us springs unconsciously from this pure fountain, 
the beauty, the tenderness, the glory, which spread 
their revelations round us as we tread — how often 
with careless eye and heart ! — the pathways of this 
wonderful world. " Fearfully and wonderfully 
made "is creation, as well as man. Who does 
not pity from his very heart the plodder who has 
never, when beholding the morning's pomp, or 
the evening's glow, the gleaming of the dew in 
the eye of the summer dawn, or the solemn host 
of stars on a clear winter's night, poured forth a 
rapturous gush of praise, that God had led him 
forth into a world like this ? We fume and fret 
over our human collisions and mischances. This 
one refuses us a glance of love, that one bends on 
us a sneer or frown : but how calmly Orion looks 
down upon it all, and rebukes our petulance ! how 
tenderly the moonbeams kiss our flushed brows, 
and tell us, as a dumb creature might tell its 
thoughts, that the troubles of life are not infinite 
nor eternal, that there are fountains of pure joy 

26 



402 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

for man which flow on, despite the " slings and 
arrows " of his fellows, the same yesterday, to-day, 
and for ever. 

But none can find a full response in nature. 
Nature is most to him who sees the limits of her 
ministry. Indeed her truest lovers find a strange 
sadness in her tones. There is a profound depth 
of truth in the apostle's thought about the groan- 
ing of the whole creation, its travailing in pain 
until the day of the manifestation of the sons 
of God. The veil has been dropped over the 
pristine splendour of creation, or at least over 
our vision of it, by sin. The world around us 
has been set in tune with our state of toil and 
discipline by the Lord. There are flashings 
through the veil, and a glow behind it, which 
tints its pallor; but it is there, most palpable 
to the finer spirits who search out, through the 
creation, the thoughts of the Creator, God. There 
runs a deep, sad undertone of aspiration through 
the universe. Each order of creatures has a pro- 
pulsive movement to a higher order — some rudi- 
ment of an organ or a use which can only be 
justified and explained by that which is to come 
next above it in the scale of life. The whole 
looks on to man and sees itself completed in 
him ; that is, in his completeness, which is not 
realized yet. This explains the groaning of 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 403 

creation. It is the groan of man prolonged 
through the orders of which he is the head. 
The cry of the creation is as it were the cry 
of a soul in bonds. Is it Goethe or Bettina 
who says, that "nature seems ever like a captive 
sighing to be delivered?" It aims at an ideal 
beauty and harmony which art interprets, which 
is never realised here, which never will be realised 
on this side of the flood of death. We see these 
things but dimly — we, whose organization is less 
fine and keen. But we are bound to take note of 
them ; what touches consciously the finer spirits, 
touches unconsciously, let us be sure, and in- 
fluences the destinies of the common millions of 
our race. The sick, with their sharper senses, 
are conscious of atmospheric influences which the 
multitude take no note of, but which are raising 
or depressing the vital spirits of the inhabitants 
of a whole land. Again, the people use a speech 
in their commonest talk, whose ample and elabo- 
rate forms have been wrought to that amplitude 
and completeness, by the subtle discussions, and 
consequent distinctions, of schoolmen, whose 
theses the multitude would have laughed out of 
the schools. And if the mass, occupied with the 
weary task of life, with but rare and partial 
vision of Nature, find her quite fair and good 
enough for their satisfaction, let them not despise 

28—2 



404 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

the wisdom of the wise who see a veil upon her 
glory — the Pauls, whose " whole creation groan - 
eth and travaileth in pain together until now." 

But, veiled as she is, like the elder dispensa- 
tion, like the elder dispensation she is glorious 
still ; though that glory shall be done away, not 
abolished, but absorbed, "by that glory which 
excelleth," when the apocalypse of the new heaven 
and the new earth shall be revealed. Behind the 
veil are marvels of God's handiwork, and glories 
of his art, which it were worth " the wanderings " 
of a life to look upon. I sometimes think that 
did we know, as we seem to draw near the dark 
cold river, what splendours lie beyond it, we should 
rush to the margin, plunge headlong, breast it, 
and be there. 

To the pure-hearted alone is the vision open. 
There is no veil which can be drawn over Nature 
so thick, as the crust which the sensual gather 
around the organs and the very senses of their 
being. "The graves of lust" bury not the soul 
only, but its world— nay, two worlds. To the 
child and to the child-like, the wonder is ever 
fresh, the glory is ever glowing; and to such a 
vision is opened, which exalts their joy to rapture 
when they look, according to His promise, for the 
new heaven and the new earth ; that is, for the true 
revelation of the world. Ezekiel saw the vision, 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 405 

and John, and fell entranced as dead. To see 
the face of that glorious world and live, is as hard 
as to see the face of God. To them it had an 
awful splendour and majesty, as the face of day to 
him who has been long mewed in darkness, or 
life to that risen man who had been bound by 
the bands of death. What radiant colour, what 
ravishing tones, what resplendent and exquisite 
forms shall burst upon us when the veils are 
parted, they who have passed through alone could 
tell us ; though methinks those can guess some- 
what who have looked into the dying eyes of such 
as are " departing to be with Christ, which is 
far better." What boundless riches of Divine 
wisdom the creation, which becomes visible to the 
eye that is purged by death, can unfold ! What 
books of Divine thoughts for the disciplined and 
reverent intellect to explore ! To roam with the 
eagle sight and the tireless strength of the immor- 
tal body through the fields of the redeemed 
creation ; to range through the depths, in which 
we grope, as through a glass darkly, by'tke minis- 
try of science, but where we shall then see all 
that God can manifest of glory face to face, and 
know even as also we are known ! We have but 
here the grammar of the speech of celestial form, 
the manual of its music. Pray God that we learn 
it lovingly, and practise it tunefully, that we may 



406 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

be fit to talk of God's handiwork with the angels, 
and to bear the part that beseems us, in their 
hymns of praise ! 

III. The heart claims its satisfaction, in the 
communion of the blessed — the joy of fellowship 
when the struggle and toil are ended for ever — the 
companionship of the elect and beloved — inter- 
course with the elder spirits who are before the 
throne. 

It is hard, in this world, not to dread meetings 
because of partings, greetings because of farewells. 
The purest joys are dashed by the foretaste of 
sorrow, the closest and dearest bonds have no 
assurance against the rude violence of death. And 
it is well. We would not live always : we would 
not take our fill of joy in such a world as this. 
Our hope stretches into brighter and more blessed 
regions, where those who meet have met for ever ; 
where those who love need no dark warnings, lest 
love should grow idolatrous and write its epitaph. 
For those who meet, meet before the face of God, 
and those who love, love in Him. Our highest 
fellowships here are a portion of God's fellowship. 
We must love that which is of Him in our dear 
ones, if we would not love to our loss. There, our 
whole society shall be but the organ of His com- 
munion. We can loose the bands, spread wide 
the tendrils of our affection, they will but maintain 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 407 

the vivid circulation of His life. Which of us has 
not wept bitterly over the desecrations of the holi- 
ness of love, the poisonings of the sweetness of 
friendship, by sin ? Which of us has not longed, 
in some hour of blest communion, to pass up ere 
sin could stain it, and present it for consecration 
before the face of Christ ? 

But our friendships as well as ourselves must 
' { wander. ' ' By the way of the wilderness they, too, 
are led to their glorious rest. Happy if they early 
drop their plaints and lusts as they travel^ and 
stand pure and earnest, loyal and submissive, 
before the river which guards the borders of the 
celestial land. Oh ! the bliss of the long-tried 
friendships and loves that shall reach it, the way- 
worn comrades who shall renew their pledges on 
the farther side of the river of death. Not a pang, 
not a parting, not a self-denial, not a self-sacrifice, 
but shall then be fondly remembered; acts and 
sufferings which could not be spoken of here — too 
sacred, too solemn — will reveal there their depths 
of love. On earth love must go cross -bearing, 
like Him from whose essential Being it springs. 
Many an agony of suffering and sacrifice, known 
only to Christ, it must endure. But it shall be 
known then : the thorn scars shall glow with 
lustre, and be the gems in the Crown of Life. 
Bear bravely, silently, the strain of unselfish, self- 



408 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

sacrificing, ministering tenderness ; it is making 
love immortal ; it is making the bliss of Heaven 
intense and complete. 

I think, too, of long-sundered ones, whose love 
cannot forget : who have laid up its hope in 
trust with Christ, and shall find it again on the 
eternal shore. Mothers, who, in their death- 
agony, have committed their orphans with sublime 
confidence to the Father of the fatherless, and will 
claim them at His hand in their glorious forms 
on high. The lovers, too, who have loved with 
an immortal passion ; the twin souls that but 
exist asunder, that strain through the veil of 
death, to be locked in the bands of an immortal 
fellowship, and burn with a life intenser than the 
seraphim, before the throne of Him who made 
them one. There are long life-agonies, too, 
which make no moan on earth ; hearts breaking 
for years in unlovely or hateful bonds of fellow- 
ship, from which there is no extrication, whose 
only utterance is through weary wasted features 
and eyes dim with ceaseless tears, or it may be 
in those nobler ministerings to misery which the 
stricken only can yield. For such, heaven has 
compensations which shall explain and justify 
even sorrow like theirs. There are kindred spirits 
in those heavenly mansions ready to receive them 
to an immortal fellowship, and make them rich 



THE' EVERLASTING JOY. 409 

in the bliss of communion and love through 
eternity. He, who for one dread moment was 
alone on earth, as even the loneliest has never 
been, is there the centre of all observation, and 
the object of all adoration and love. Perhaps, 
the loneliest here are training to be the centres 
of spheres of attraction, of homes of love, in the 
many mansions of the Father's kingdom on high. 
Nor is it forbidden to sit beneath the footstool 
of the masters, and gather wisdom from the most 
eloquent lips. The things once unspeakable have 
now found their expression ; the unsearchable 
mysteries have found their interpreters. It shall 
be permitted to us to fathom the depth of the 
wisdom and the love of God in Christ, with a 
Paul for an expositor, or, mingling with the 
wise and the great of old, lift ourselves to their 
levels, while they press on to higher achievements, 
and pass up to a nearer vision of God. No 
dreary average of endowment, no weary same- 
nesses of glory, shall repeat the monotone of 
Egypt above. " One star differeth from another 
star in glory." " So also is it in the resurrection 
of the dead." A grand and free variety, more 
richly multiform, more profoundly one, than that 
which accomplished the soul's education, shall 
minister to its life in the realm of life, in 
heaven. 



410 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

Nor is the passage a long one ; nor is the home 
far. The analogues of death are all round us 
in the creation, and nowhere are they terrible 
but in the apprehension of the sinner — man. 
There is no death which man knows which is not 
the germ of a higher, finer, braver life. Nothing 
dies but to minister to progress. No order of 
creation perishes but a more perfect one appears. 
Wherever we see decay and dissolution, be sure 
that the stuff is wanted for a finer manufacture ; 
God breaks up nothing but to improve. It is 
true in nature ; it is true in history. The same 
great thought runs through the whole scale of 
being, and finds its highest expression in God's 
ordinance of death and resurrection for man. Sin 
made it a terror ; Christ makes it an angel. It 
is to inherit the kingdom, that flesh and blood 
must be put off. Man, too, is to be purged and 
refined in common with the creation, to put off his 
coarser and grosser habiliments, and be clothed in 
flesh of finer texture, and fit for more subtle and 
delicate use : of this, death is but the minister. 
Our best angel, could we see it, is Christ's angel 
of death. And the home to which he leads us, as 
we have said, may not be so far away. We talk 
and muse on it as distant, but were the veils lifted 
we might see with wonder that it is here. There 
are strange comminglings of the two worlds 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 411 

even in our daily marches ; and sometimes 
the thought haunts us that the dearest, who 
have passed through the veil, are not far 
away. The idea that the two worlds inter- 
penetrate and intermingle, is fast growing 
familiar. We may shrink, even with loathing, 
from the thought that the great dead are ready to 
obey our idle biddings, and that they have no 
better occupation than to make an evening's en- 
tertainment for a " circle " of empty hearts ; and 
yet we may believe that they may touch us in 
our solemn moments, foil our tempters, hush our 
passions, soothe our frets, and inspire our hopes. 
All that makes the future home-like ; all that 
casts out fear and opens vision to those who 
believe ; all that makes the apparitor of death 
angelic, and brings life and immortality into the 
broad daylight of our common world, is God's 
truth about heaven. 

But why has God made death so dread, if He 
would have us so familiar with it ? If death is 
to be our benignant angel, why has He clothed 
him with a presence so awful ; why has He taught 
the flesh — yea, and something deeper than the 
flesh — to shudder at his advancing tread ? Is 
life so blessed, then, brethren, that we should be 
content to await the summons, if all the benignant 
beauty of death were unveiled ? Should we not 



412 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

rush up life's pathways to meet him, shout to him 
as our deliverer, and pray him to bear us swiftly 
home ? And is it not right that the doomsman 
should still wear his terror, though Christ has 
transmuted the doom to benediction — the dark- 
ness to glory ? Is it not well that sin should have 
amongst us still a stern expositor ; that we should, 
while evil still tempts us, haunts us, and is inwoven 
with the very texture of our being, tremble and 
shudder at death ? Death remains awful ; for the 
sin remains awful from which it sprang, and the 
cost of that Kedemption is awful by which it shall 
be destroyed. I say that death is terrible still. 
Nothing can fully cast out its terror. Conquer 
every enemy, there is a last enemy who still 
remains to be mastered ; before whose advent the 
flesh will quiver, the heart will flutter, the soul 
will agonize still. And yet I think that the terror, 
to those who pass through it, is less terrible than 
appears. Who has not marked that beautiful 
preparedness for death in those who are mani- 
festly appointed to die ? I suppose that, as they 
draw near the veil, it becomes more fully trans- 
parent ; the soul gets absorbed in vision ; and the 
agonized quiverings of the perishing flesh, which 
is all that we can look upon, are to the dying not 
worthy to be compared with the glory which is 
being revealed. Who feels the pain of a wound 



THE EVERLASTING JOY. 413 

amid the high excitements of battle ? Fear not, 
trembler ! to whom death is the great terror still, 
fear not : there are visions to be seen in that dark 
valley, and bliss to be tasted, which purge all the 
pain of the dying away. 

Oh ! could we but at this moment lift the veil, 
and sweep one earnest glance over the heavenly 
plains, our life would become a longing for the 
moment of emancipation ; and of all God's angels, 
the brightest and most welcome would be His 
Angel of Death ! Who would not rather depart, 
and be with Christ, which is far better, if he were 
as sure as the Apostle was at length, that his life- 
work was accomplished, his battle fought out, his 
victory for ever won ? What here should keep us 
from the white-robed throng, the palm, the crown, 
the vision of the Saviour, the rest of the blessed 
and glorified with Him ? "I would not live 
alway," is the cry of all earnest and faithful 
hearts; " here I can but guess what life means." 
" Oh, that I now might die ! " were we more often 
on Pisgah, would be more often our prayer ; not 
in desperate mood, as the bankrupts of life, but 
in hopeful, and therefore patient mood, as the 
heirs of eternity. 

And how many of the heirs may read these 
lines? Sons of God, still hanging round the 
flesh-pots, still haunting, though weeping and 



414 THE EVERLASTING JOY. 

groaning, the Goshens of life ! Methinks, at this 
moment, the summons of a Divine leader is again 
ringing through the air. A Divine hand is again 
leading you out one step towards the free broad 
desert, from the prison-house of sin. Again 
there is stormy strife within the innermost recesses 
of your being. " Go forward," saith the Divine 
guide; '''Come back," cries the clinging world, 
and wantons round you lest you should burst her 
spells. The Divine call and the earthly passions 
are warring; and devils, and angels, and some 
dearer than dear life, are watching — how eagerly ! 
— the path which you elect to take. What dear 
associations for some of you, for all of you, if 
you knew where your true kindred dwell, surround 
the path of Divine duty. How sacred the tracks 
of the desert grow by the footsteps that have 
trodden them ! The great cloud of witnesses is 
above and around you, but they have left their 
foot-tracks in the desert ; and there are the stains 
of the tears and the blood of those, who were not 
afraid of the fellowship of the sufferings of the 
Saviour, and who passed up to glory, by being 
conformed even unto His death. How many of 
them are there on the far side of Jordan, straining 
back their gaze to watch your steps ! They rest 
not yet in glory, they wait that you may pass with 
them ; they watch while you are struggling, sus- 



THE EVERLASTIXG JOY. 415 

tained by the hope that you will rest with them at 
last. Come, then, and join the beloved company ; 
the way will be bright in their companionship, the 
rest will be blessed in their arms. Listen to the 
voice of the Divine Captain : " Mine angel shall 
go before thee, and shall bring thee into the 
place wiiich I have prepared." See here before 
you, at this moment, His bright, flaming pillar, 
casting forth its lustre over the desert, and mark- 
ing through its desolate wilds, your heavenward 
w r ay : and see there, in the far distance, the bright- 
ening splendour, the full unfolding of celestial 
glories, in the midst of wiiich the angels, in 
blest anticipation, are hymning your triumphs 
and w r eaving your crowns. 

" Except Thy presence go with me, carry 
me not up hence." 

"And (xod said, My presence shall go 
w t ith thee, i w t ill give thee rest." 



THE END. 



London : Smith, Elder and Co., Little Gi'een Arbour Court, Old Bailey, E.C. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 

In One Vol., Crown 8vo, pp. 396, in old-faced type, red edges* 
Price 7s. 6d. 

THE DIVINE LIFE IN MAN. 

Second Edition. 

ALSO, 

In Cloth. Crown 8vo, price Is. 

THE DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE 

FATHERHOOD IN RELATION TO THE 

ATONEMENT. 



WARD and Co., Paternoster Row. 



Published Monthly, Crown 8vo, neat Wrapper, price 2d. each, 

AIDS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 
DIVINE LIFE. 

By the Rev. Baldwin Brown. 

They will form, it is hoped, suitable Tracts for circulation among 
those of the Working Classes who are willing to read brief, plain, 
and practical expositions of the principles of Christian Truth. 

No. 1, on November 1st, 

THE DECEASE ACCOMPLISHED AT 
JERUSALEM. 

No. 2, on December 1st, 

TEARFUL SOWERS, JOYFUL REAPERS. 

No. 3, on December 15th, 

QUIT YOU LIKE MEN! 

No. 4, on February 1, 1862, 

" COME WITH US, AND WE WILL DO YOU 
GOOD." 

A Tract for distribution. 



.ondon: HENRY JAMES TRESIDDER, 17, Ave Maria Lane, E.C, 



65, Cornhill, London, 
November, 18G2. 



NEW AND STANDARD WORKS 

PUBLISHED BY 

SMITH, ELDEE AND CO. 



ELEGANT GIFT BOOK. 

The New Forest; Its History and Scenery. 

By John R. Wise. With Sixty Views, and other Illustrations, by 
Walter Crane. A New Map of the Forest, and Sections. Small 4to. 
Printed on Toned Paper, and Superbly Bound. Price One Guinea. 

Shakespeare Commentaries. By Professor gervinus. 

Tranlsated under the Author's superintendence, by F. E. Bunnett. 
Two Volumes. Demy 8vo. Price 245. cloth. 

Journal of a Political Mission to Afghanistan, 

With an Account of the Country and People. By H. W. Bellew, 
Surgeon to the Mission. With 8 Plates. Demy 8vo. Price 16s. cloth. 

Waterloo : The Downfall of the First Napoleon. 

A History of the Campaign of 1815. By George Hooper. With 
Maps and Plans. Demy 8vo. Price 15s. cloth. 

Life in Nature. By James IIinton. Author of "Man and 
his Dwelling Place." Crown 8vo. Price 6s. cloth. 

Ten Years in the United States ; Being an 

Englishman's Views of Men and Things in the North and South. By 
D. W. Mitchell. Post 8vo. Price 9s. cloth. 

Adventures of a Boy Lost Among the Affghans. 

Related by Himself. Post 8vo. With Portrait. Price 7s. 6d. cloth. 

Sisterhoods in the Church of England. By 

Margaret Goodman. Author of <c Experiences of an English Sister 
of Mercy." Post 8vo. Price 6s. cloth. 

A New Volume of Sermons. By the late Rev. 

Frederick W. Robertson, M.A., of Brighton. Post 8vo. 

An Analysis of Mr. Tennyson's " In Me- 

moriam." By the late Rev. Frederick W. Robertson. M.A. Fcap. 
8vo. Cloth. 



New and Standard Works published hy 



England Under God. By the venerable archdeacon 

Evans. Author of "The Rectory of Valehead." Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d.c\. 

After Dark. By Wilkie Collins. Author of " The Woman in 

White," &c. A new Edition. With Four Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 
Price 5s. cloth. 

London People: Sketched from Life. By Charles 

Bennett. With Numerous Illustrations. Ecap. 4to, elegantly bound. 

Roundabout Papers. (Reprinted from the Cornhill Magazine.) 
By W. M. Thackeray. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 

Life in the Forests of the Far East ; or 

Travels in Northern Borneo. By Spenser St. John, E.R.G.S., F.E.S. 
Late H.M.'sConsul-General in Borneo, now H.M.'s Charge d'Affairesto 
Hayti. Second Edition, Revised. Illustrated with Sixteen Coloured and 
Tinted Lithographs, and Three Maps. Two Volumes. Demy 8vo. 32s. 

Cochin, its Past and its Present ; including 

an Account of the History, Ethnology, Zoology, and Botany of 
Cochin : with Remarks on the Religion, Manners, and Customs of its 
various Castes and Sects. By Erancis Day, Esq., E.L.S., Civil 
Surgeon of Cochin. In One Yolume, 8vo. 

NEW JUVENILE WORKS. 

Tuflongbo's Journey in Search of Ogres. 

With an Account of his Early Life, and how his Shoes got worn out. 
By Holme Lee, Author of "Legends of Fairy Land," &c. Ecap. 
8vo. With Seven Illustrations. Price 3*. 6c?. cloth. 

Stories of Old ; or Bible Narratives suited to 

the Capacity of Young Children. By Caroline Hadley. 
1st Series. — Old Testament. With Seven Illustrations, by Walter Crane. 

Ecap 8vo. Price 3s. 6d. cloth. 
2nd Series. — New Testament. With Seven Illustrations, by Walter 
Crane. Ecap 8vo. Price 3s. 6d. cloth. 

*** The Volumes are sold separately. 
By the same Author. 

Children's Sayings : or, Early Life at Home. 

Eour Illustrations, by Walter Crane. Square 16mo. 2s. 6d. cloth. „ 

NEW NOVELS. 
Entanglements . By the Author of "Mr. Arle," " Caste," &c. 

Two Vols. 
Normanton. By A. J. Barrotvcliffe, Author of "Amberhilh" 

and " Trust for Trust." One Vol. 
Skirmishing. By the Author of "Who Breaks, Pays," and 

" Cousin Stella." One Vol. 



Smith, Elder § Co., 65, Cornliill, London. 

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. 



Vancouver Island and Bri- 
tish Columbia : Where they are; 
What they are; and What they may 
become. 

By Dr. A lexander Rattray, 

of the Royal Navy. Post 8vo. Four 
Plates and Two Maps. 55. cloth. 

History of the Four Con- 
quests of England. 

By James Augustus St. John, Esq. 
Two Vols. 8vo. Price 28s. cloth. 

History of the Venetian 
Republic : 

By W. Carew Eazlitt. 

Complete in 4 vols. 8vo, with Illustra- 
tions, price 21. 16s., cloth. 

%* Volumes III. and TV. may be 'had 
separately. 

The Life and Letters of 
Captain John Brown. 

Edited by Richard D. Webb. 
With Portrait. Fcap 8vo. Pries 45. 6d. 

cloth. 

Life of Schleiermacher, 

As unfolded in his Autobiography 

and Letters. 

Translated by Frederica Rowan. 

Two vols, post 8vo, with Portrait. 

Price One Guinea, cloth. 

The Life of Charlotte 
Bronte (Currer Bell). 

By Mrs. Gaslell. 
Fourth Library Edition, revised, one 
vol., with a Portrait of Miss Bronte 
and a View of Ha worth Parsonage. 
Price 7s. 6c?. ; morocco elegant, 14s-. 



Life of Edmond Malone, 

Editor of Shakspeare's Works. 
With Selections from his MS. 
'Anecdotes. 

By Sir James Prior. 
V.cmy 8vo, with Portrait, 14s. cloth. 

The Autobiography of 
Leiffh Hunt. 

vol., post Svo, with 



One vol., post 
Library edition. 



Portrait. 
Price Is. 6 g?. cloth. 



Life of Lord Metcalfe. 

By John William Kaye. 

New Edition, in Two Vols., post Svo, 

with Portrait. Price 12s. cloth. 

Life of 
Sir John Malcolm, G.C.B. 

By John William Kaye. 

Two Vols. 8vo, with Portrait. 

Price 36s. cloth. 

The Autobiography of 
Lutfullah. 

A Mohamedan Gentleman ; with an 

Account of his Visit to England. 

Edited by E. B. Eastwick, Esq. 

Third Edition, Fcap 8vo. 

Price 5s. cloth. 



The Life of Mahomet. 

With Introductory Cbapters on the 
Original Sources for the Biography 
of Mahomet, and on the Pre-Islamite 
History of Arabia. 

By W. M%dr, Esq., Bengal C.S. 

Complete in Four Vols. Demy 8vo. 
Price 2/. 2s. cloth. 

*** Vols. III. and IV. may be had 
separately, price 21s. 

Women of Christianity 

Exemplary for Piety and Charity. 

By Julia Kavanagh. 

Post 8vo, with Portraits. Price SSi in 

embossed cloth. 



New and Standard Works published by 



VOYAGES AND TRAVELS. 



Bobert OTIara Burke and 

the Australian Exploring Expedition 
of 1860. 

By Andrew Jackson. 

With Map and Portrait. Tost Svo. 
Price 6s. cloth. 

The Bifle in Cashmere. 

A Narrative of Shooting Expeditions j 
in La dak, Cashmere, &c. With Ad- i 
■vice on Travelling, Shooting, and | 
Stalking. To which are added notes j 
on Army Reform and Indian Politics. 

By Arthur Brinchnan. 
Late of H.M.'s 94th Eegiment. With ! 
Two Illustrations. Post 8to. Price 
8.9. 6d. cloth. 

Scripture Lands 

In connection with their History : 
With an Appendix : and Extracts 

from a Journal kept during an 

Eastern Tour in 1856-7. 

By the Bev. G. S. Drew, 

Author of " Scripture Studies/' &c. 

Second Edition, post Svo, with a Map, 

price 105. 6d. cloth. 

A Visit to the Philippine 
Isles in 1858-59. 
By Sir John Bowring, 

Demy Svo, with numerous Illustra- 
tions, price 185. cloth. 

Narrative of the Mission 
to Ava. 

By Captain Henry Yule, Bengal 
Engineers. 

Imperial Svo, with Twenty-four Plates 
(Twelve coloured), Eifty Woodcuts, 
and Four Maps. Elegantly bound 
in cloth, with gilt edges, price 
21. 125. Gd. 



Egypt in its Bihlical 

Belations. 

By the Rev. J. Fouikes Jones. 

Post Svo, price 7s. Gd. cloth. 

Japan, the Amoor, and the 
Pacific. 

A Voyage of Circumnavigation in the 
Imperial Russian Corvette "Eynda," 
in 1858-59-60. 

By Henry Arthur Tilley. 
Svo, with illustrations, 165. cloth. 

Through Norway with a 
Knapsack. 

By W. M. Williams. 

With Six Coloured Views. Third 

Edition, post Svo, price 125. cloth. 

• Turkish Life and 
Character. 

By Walter Thombury. 
Author of " Life in Spain," &c. &c. 
Two Vols., with Eight Tinted Illus- 
trations, price 215. cloth. 

Voyage to Japan, 

Kanitschatka, Siberia, Tartary, 
and the Coast of China, in 
H.M.S. Barracouta. 
By J. M. Tronson, R.&. 

8vo, with Charts and Views. 185. cloth. 

To Cuba and Back. 

By B. II. Dana, 

Author of " Two Years before the 

Mast," &c. 

Post 8vo, price 75. cloth. 

Life and Liberty in 
America. 

By Br. C. Mackay. 

Second Edition, 2 vols., post Svo, with. 

Ten Tinted Illustrations, price 21;. 



Smith, Elder fy Co., 65, Cornliill, London 



WORKS OF MR. RUSKIN, 



Modern Painters, 

Now complete in five vols., Imperial 8vo, with 87 Engravings on 
Steel, and 216 on Wood, chiefly from Drawings by the Author. 
With Index to the whole Work. Price 81. Gs. Gd., in cloth. 

EACH VOLUME MAY BE HAD SEPARATELY. 

Vol. I. 6th Edition. OF GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND OF TRUTH. 

Price 18*. cloth. 
Vol. H. 4th Edition. OF THE IMAGINATIVE AND THEORETIC 

FACULTIES. Price 10s. 6d. cloth. 
Vol. III. OF MANY THINGS. With Eighteen Illustrations drawn by the 

Author, and engraved on Steel. Price 38s. cloth. 
Vol. IV. ON MOUNTAIN BEAUTY. With Thirty-five Illustrations 

engraved on Steel, and 116 Woodcuts, drawn by the Author. 

Price 2/. 10s. cloth. 
Vol. V. OF LttAF BEAUTY; OF CLOUD BEAUTY; OF IDEAS OF 

RELATION. With Thirty-four Engravings on Steel, and 100 on 

Wood. Price 2/. 10s. With Index to the five volumes. 



The Stones of Venice. 

Complete in Three Volumes, Imperial ; 
8vo, with Fifty-three Plates and | 
numerous Woodcuts, drawn by the 
Author. Price 5/. 15s. 6c/. cloth. 

EACH VOLUME MAY BE HAD SEPARATELY. 
Vol. I. The FOUNDATIONS, with 21 Plates. 

Price 21. 2s. 2nd Edition. 
Vol. II. THE SEA STORIES, with 20 Plates. 

Price 2/. 2s. 
Vol. III. THE FALL, with 12 Plates. Price 

1/. lis. Cd. 

The Seven Lamps of 
Architecture. 

Second Edition, with Eourteen Plates 
drawn by the Author. Imp. 8vo. 
Price 1/. Is. cloth. 

Lectures on 
Architecture and Painting. 

With Fourteen Cuts, drawn by tnc 
Author. Second Edition, crown Svo. 
Price 8s. 6c/. cloth. 



Selections from the 
Writings of J. Kuskin,M. A. 

One Volume. Post 8vo, with a Por- 
trait. Gs. cloth. Morocco elegant, 125. 



" Unto this Last," 

Pour Essays on the First Principles of 

Political Economy. 
With Preface. Fcap Svo. 3*. 6c/. cloth. 

Pre-Eaphaelitism. 

A New Edition. Demy Svo. Price 2$, 

The TwTPaths : 

Being Lectures on Art, and its relation 
to Manufactures and Decoration. 

One vol., crown 8vo, with Two Steel 
Engravings. Price 7s. 6c/. cloth. 

The Elements of Drawing 

Sixth Thousand, crown 8vo, with Illus- 
trations drawn by the Author. Price 
7s. 6d. cloth. 

The Elements of 
Perspective. 

With 80 Diagrams, crown 8vo. Price 
3s. 6d. cloth. 

The Political Economy of 
Art. 

Price 2*. dd, cloth. 



New and Standard Works published by 



RELIGIOUS 



Sermons : 

By the late Rev. Fred. W. Robertson, 
Incumbent of Trinity Chapel, Brighton. 
First Series. — Ninth Edition, post 

8vo. Price 9s. cloth. 
Second Series. — Eighth Edition. 

Price 95. cloth. 
Third Series. — Seventh Edition, post 

8vq, with Portrait. Price 9s. cloth. 

Expositions of St. Paul's 
Epistles to the Corinthians. 

By the late Rev. Fred. W. Robertson. 

Second Edition. One thick Volume, 

post 8vo. Price 10s. 6d. cloth. 

Lectures and Addresses. 
By the late FredTc. W. Robertson, 
A New Edition. Ecap 8vo. 5s. cloth. 

The Gospel in the Miracles 
of Christ, 

ByRev.Richd. Travers Smith,M.A. 
Chaplain of St. Stephen's, Dublin. 
Ecap 8vo, price 5s. cloth. 

Sermons : 

Preached at Lincoln's Inn Chapel. 
By the Rev. F. D. Maurice, M. A. 
Eirst Series, 2 vols., post 8vo, price 

21s. cloth. 
Second Series, 2 vols., post 8vo, 

price 21s. cloth. 
Third Series, 2 vols., post 8vo, 

price 21s. cloth. 

Experiences of an English 

Sister of Mercy. 

By Margaret Goodman. 

3rd edit, revised, Fcap 8vo. 3s. 6d. cloth. 

Tauler's Life and Sermons. 

Translated by Miss Susanna 

Wink worth. 

With Preface by Eev. C. Kingslet. 

Small 4to, price 7s. 6d. cloth. 



The Soul's Exodus and 

Pilgrimage. 

By the Rev. J. Baldwin Brown, 

Author of " The Divine Life in Man." 

Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 

cloth. Morocco elegant, 12s. 

"Is it not Written?" 

Being the Testimony of Scripture 
against the Errors of Romanism. 

By Edward S. Pryce, A.B. 
Post 8vo. Price 6s. cloth. 

Quakerism, Past and 
Present : 

Being an Inquiry into the Causes of 
its Decline. 

By John S. Rowntree. 
Post 8vo. Price 5s. cloth. 
* HJ * This Essay gained the First Prize 
of One Hundred Guineas offered for 
the best Essay on the subject. 

The Peculium ; 

An Essay on the Causes of the Decline 
of the Society of Erk-nds. 

By Thomas Hancock, 

Post 8vo. Price 5s. cloth. 

*,* This Essay gained the Second 

Prize of Fifty Guineas, which was 

afterwards increased to One Hundred. 

THE BISHOP OF SALISBURY I 
DR. WILLIAMS. 

The Defence of Dr. Eow- 
land Williams ; 

Being a Report of the Speech delivered 
in the Court of Arches, by James 
Fitzjames Stephen, M. A., Recorder 
of Newark -on- Trent. Published 
from the Shorthand Writer's Notes, 
Revised and Corrected. Post 8vc. 
Price lus Gd. cloth. 



Smith, Elder 8f Co., 65, Comldll, London. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 



Lectures on Horses and [ The Correspondence of 
Stables. 

By Lieut.- Col. Fitzwygram, 
15th (the King's) Hussars. 
First and Second Series (to be con- 
tinued). Demy 8vo. Price 4s. 6d, 
cloth. 



Leigh Hunt. 

Edited by his Eldest Son. 

Two Vols. Post 8vo, with Portrait. 
Price 24s. cloth. 



Beminiscences of Captain 

Gronow. With Pour Illustrations. 
Second Edition, Revised. Crown 
8vo. 9s. cloth. 

Essays by a Barrister. 

(Reprinted from the Saturday Review.) 
Post8vo. Price 95. cloth. 

Studies in Animal Life. 

By George Henry Lewes. 

Author of "The Life of Goethe," 
"Sea -Side Studies," "Physiology 
of Common Life." &c. With Illus- 
trations. Post 8vo. Price Us. cloth. 

Education in Oxford : 

Its Method, its Aids, and its Rewards. 

By James E. Thorold Rogers, M. A. 

Post 8vo, price 65. cloth. 

Manuals for Ladies. 

Flowers for Ornament and 

Decoration ; and How to Arrange 
Them. With Coloured Prontispiece. 
Price 2s. 6c?. cloth. 

By the same Author. 

In-Door Plants ; and How 

to Grow Them for the Drawing- 
Room, Balcony, and Green-House. 
5th Thousand. With Coloured Pron- 
tispiece. Price 2s. Qd. cloth. 

Song Birds ; and How to 

Keep Them. With Coloured Frontis- 
piece. Pcap 8vo. Price 2s. 6d. cloth. 



Intellectual Education, 

and its Influence on the Cha- 
racter and Happiness of Women. 
By Emily Shirreff. 
2nd Ed. Crown 8vo. Price 65. cloth. 



Household Medicine ; 

and Sick-Room Guide. 
Describing Diseases, their Nature, 
Causes, and Symptoms, with the 
most approved Methods of Treat- 
ment, and the Properties and Uses 
of many new Remedies. 

By John Gardner, M.D. 

8vo, with numerous Illustrations. 

Price 10s. 60?. cloth. 



The Four Georges: 

Sketches of Manners, Morals, 
Court and Town Life. 
By W. M. Thackeray. 

With Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 
Price 5s. cloth. 



Shakspere and his 
Birthplace. 

By John R. Wise. 
With 22 Illustrations by W. J. Linton, 
Crown 8 vo. Printed on Toned Paper, 
ami handsomely bound in ornamental 
cloth, gilt edges, price Is. 6d. 
*** Also a cheap edition, 2s. 6d. cloth. 



New and Standard Works published hy 



Port and Trade of London : 

Historical, Statistical, Local, and 

General. By Charles Capper, 

Manager of the Victoria (London) 

Docks. Price 15s. cloth. 8vo. 

New Zealand and the War. 

By William Sivainso?i, Esq. 

Author of " New Zealand and its Colo- 
zation." Post 8vo. 5s. cloth. 

The Lady's Guide to the 

Ordering of her Household, and 
the Economy of the Dinner I 
Table. By a Lady. 

Crown 8vo. Price 10s. 6c?. cloth. 

| 

The Early Italian Poets. I 

Translated hy D. G. Rossetti. 
Part I. — Poets chiefly before Dante. 
Part II. — Dante and his Circle. 
Price 12s. cloth. Post 8vo. 

Book of Good Counsels: j 

An Abridged Translation of the | 
Sanscrit Classic, the " Iiitopadesa." 

By Edwin Arnold, M.A., Oxon. | 
Author of " Education in India," &c. | 
With Illustrations by Harrison Weir. \ 
Crown 8vo, 5s. cloth. 

Bagged London. 

By John Hollingshead. 
Post 8vo, 7s. 6d. cloth. 

Man and his Dwelling 
Place. 

An Essay towards the Interpreta- 
tion of Nature. 

Second Edition. With a New Preface. 
Crown 8vo, 6s. cloth. 



Household Education. 

By Harriet Martineau. 

A New Edition. Post 8vo. Price 5s. 

cloth. 

The Conduct of Life. 

By Ralph Waldo Emerson, 

Author of "Essays," "Representative 
Men," &c. Post 8vo, price 6s. cloth. 
%* Also a Cheap Edition, Is. cloth. 

Annals of 
British Legislation : 

A Classified Summary of Parliamentary 
Papers. 
Edited by Dr. Leone Levi. 
The yearly issue consists of 1,000 
pages, sr.per- royal 8vo, and the Sub- 
scription is Two Guineas, payable 
in advance. Vols. I. to X. may 
now be had. Price 10/. 10s. cloth. 

A Handbook of Average. 

With a Chapter on Arbitration. 

By Manley Hopkins. 

Second Edition, Revised and brought 
down to the present time. 

Svo. Price 15s. cloth; 17s. 6d. half- 
bound law calf. 

Sea Officer's Manual. 

Being a Compendium of the Duties of 
Commander and Officers in the 
Mercantile Navy. 

By Captain Alfred Parish. 

Second Edition. Small post Svo. 
Price 5s. cloth. 

Manual of the Mercantile 
Law 

Of Great Britain and Ireland. 
By Dr. Leone Levi. 
8vo. Price 12s. cloth. 



Smith, Elder § Co., 65, Comhill, London. 



Commercial Law of the I Astronomical Observations. 



World. 

By Dr. Leone Levi. 
Two vols, royal 4to. Price G/. cloth. 

Victoria, 

Or the Australian Gold Mines in 1857. 

By William Westgarth. 
Post 8vo, with Maps. 10s. 6c/. cloth. 

New Zealand and its 
Colonization. 

By William Sivainson, Lsrj. 
Demy 8vo. Price lis. cloth. 

Life in Spain. 

By Walter Thornbury. 

Two Vols, post 8 vo, with Eight .Tinted 
Illustrations, price 21*. 

A Treatise on Eifles, Cannon, and 
Sporiing Arms. 

Gunnery : 

By William Greener) 

Author of " The Gun." 

Demy 8vo, with Illustrations. 

Price Us. cloth. 

On the Strength of Nations. 

By Andrew Bisset, M.A. 
Post 8vo. Price 9s. cloth. 



Made at the Sydney Obser- 
vatory in the year 1859. 
By W. Scott, M.A. 

8vo. 6s. 

On the Treatment of the 
Insane, 

Without Mechanical Restraints, 

By John Conolly, M.D. 

Demy 8vo. Price 14s. cloth. 

England and her Soldiers. 
By Harriet Martineau. 

With Three Plates of Illustrative Dia- 
grams. 1 vol. crown 8vo, price 9s. cloth. 

Tea Planting in the 
Himalaya. 

By A. T. McGowan. 
8vc, -with Frontispiece, price 5s. cloth. 

Signs of the Times ; 

Or, The Dangers to Eeligious Liberty 
in the Present Day. 

By Chevalier Bunsen. 

Translated by Miss S. WixKwonxn. 

One vol. 8vo. Price 5s. cloth. 

Wit and Humour. 

By Leigh Hunt. 
Price os. cloth. 



Results of Astronomical i 

Observations — ** — 

Made at the Cape of Good Hope. Jar of Honey from Hybla. 

By Leigh Hunt, 
Price 5s. cloth. 



By Sir John Herschel. 
4 to, witn Plates. Price 4/. 4?. cloth 



10 



New and Standard Works published by 



Men, Women, and Books. 

By Leigh Hunt. 
Two vols. Price 10s. cloth. 



Zoology of South Africa. 

By Dr. Andrew Smith. 
Royal 4to, cloth, with Coloured Plates. 

MAMMALIA £3 

AVES 7 

RBPTILIA 5 

PISCES 2 

INVERTEBRATE 1 



Keligion in Common Life. 

By William Ellis. 
Post 8vo. Price 7s. 6d. cloth. 



Life of Sir Robert Peel. 

By Thomas Doubleday. 
Two vols. 8vo. Price 18s. cloth. 

Principles of Agriculture ; 

Especially Tropical. 
By B. Lovell Phillips, M.D. 
Demy 8vo. Price 7s. 6d. cloth. 

Books for the Blind. 

Printed in raised Roman letters, at 
the Glasgow Asylum. 



SfliTH, ELDER AND GO.'S SHILLING SERIES 



STANDARD WORKS OF FICTION". 

Well printed, on good paper, and tastefully toonnd. 

Price ©2STE SHIZs&ErJG eaela Volume, 



THIRD ISSUE 

WHEAT AND TARES. Reprinted 

from " Fraser's Magazine." 
ASViBERHSLL. By A. J. Barrow- 

CLIEEE. 



YOUNG SINGLETON. By Talbot 

Gavynne. 
A LOST LOVE. By Ashpord 

Owen. 



SECOND ISSUE. 



LOST AND WON. By Georgian 

M. Ckaik. 
HAWKSViEW. By Holme Lee. 
FLORENCE TEMPLAR. ByMrs.P. 

VlDAL. 



COUSiN STELLA ; OR, CONFLICT. 

By the Author of "Who Breaks — 

Pays." 
HIGHLAND LASSIES ; OR, THE 

ROUA PASS. 



FIRST 

CONFIDENCES. By the author of 
" Rita." 

ERLESIVSERE ; or, Contrasts oe Cha- 
racter. By L. S. Lavenu. 

NANETTE AND HER LOVERS. By 
Talbot Gwynne. 

THE LIFE AMD DEATH OF SILAS 
BARN STARKE. By Talbot 
Gwynne. 

TENDER AND TRUE. By the Author 
cf'Claran." 



ISSUE. 
ROSE 



DOUGLAS ; the Autobio- 



graphy of 
Daughter. 



a Scotch Minister's 



GILBERT iVSASSENCER. By Holme 

Lee. 

THORNEY HALL : A Story op an 
Old Family. By Holme Lee. 

IVI Y LADY : A Tale op Modern Liee. 

THE CRUELEST WRONG OF ALL. 



Smith 9 Elder fy Co,, 65, Cornhill, London. 



11 



WORKS QU INDIA AND THE EAST. 



Oar Last Years in India. 

By Mrs. John B. Speid. 
Post 8vo. Price 95. cloth. 

The Wild Sports of India, 

With detailed Instructions for the 
Sportsman; to which are added 
Ke marks on the Breeding and Peer- 
ing of Horses, and the Eorrnation 
of Light Irregular Cavalry 

By Major Henry Shakespear, 
late Commandant Nagpore Irregular 
Force. With Portrait of the Author. 
Second Edition,, much Enlarged. 
Post 8vo. Price 10s. cloth. 

Cotton ; an Account of its 

Culture in the Bombay 

Presidency. 

By Walter Cassels. 
8vo, price 16s. cloth. 

Narrative of the North 

China Campaign of I860. 

By Robert Swinhoe. 

Staff Interpreter to Sir Hope Grant. 
8vo, with Illustrations. 12s. cloth. 

PRIZE ESSAY. 

Caste : 

Considered under its Moral,- Social, 

and Religions Aspects. 

By Arthur J. Patterson, B.A., of 

Trinity College. 

Post 8vo. Price 4s. <5d. cloth. 

The Sanitary Condition of 

Indian Jails. 

By Joseph Ewart, M.D., 

Bengal Medical Service. 

With Pians, 8vo. Price 16*. cloth. 



Egypt, Nubia, and 
Ethiopia. 

Illustrated by 100 Stereoscopic Photo- 
graphs, taken by Francis Frith, for 
Messrs. Negretti and Zambra; with 
Descriptions and numerous Wood 
Engravings, by Joseph Bonomi, 
F.P.S.L., and Notes by Samuel 
Sharpe. In One Vol. small 4to. 
Elegantly bound. Price 3/. 3s. 

Campaigning Experiences 

In Rajpootana and Central India 

during the Mutiny in 1857-8. 

By Mrs. Henry Duberly. 

Post 8vo, with Map. Price 10s. 6d. 

cloth. 

Narrative of the Mutinies 
in Oude. 

By Captain G. Hutchinson, 

Military Secretary, Oude. 

Post 8vo. Price 10s. cloth. 

A Lady's Escape from 
Gwalior 

During the Mutinies of 1857. 

By Mrs. Coopland. 

Post 8vo. Price 10s. 6 J. 

Views and Opinions of 
Gen. Jacob, C.B. 

Edited by Captain Lewis Felly. 
Demy 8vo. Price 12s. cloth. 

Papers of the late Lord 
Metcalfe. 

By John William Kaye. 
Demy 8vo. Price 16s. cloth. 

The English in India. 

By Philip Anderson, A.M. 
Second Edition, 8vo. Price 14*. clot!:. 



12 



New and Standard Works published by 



Indian Exchange Tables. 

By J. H. Roberts. 

Svo. Second Edition, enlarged. 

Price 10 s. 6d. cloth. 

Christianity in India. 

A Historical Narrative. 

By John William Kaye. 

8vo. Price lGs. cloth. 

The Parsees : 

Their History, Eeligion, Manners, and 

Customs. 

By Dosabhoy Framjee. 

Post 8vo. Price 10s. cloth. 

The Vital Statistics 

Of the European and Native Annies 
in India. 

By Joseph Eve art, M.D. 
Demy 8vo. Price 9s. cloth. 

The Bhilsa Topes ; 

Or, Buddhist Monuments of Central 

India. 

By Major Cunningham. 

One vol. 8 vo, with Thirty-three Plates. 

Price 305. cloth. 

The Chinese and their 
Rebellions. 

By Thomas Taylor Meadows. 

One thick volume, 8vo, with Maps. 

Price 185. cloth. 

Hong Kong to Manilla. 

By Henry T. Ellis, M.N. 

Post Svo, with Fourteen Illustrations. 

Price 12s. cloth. 

The Botany of the 
Himalaya. 

By Dr. Forbes Boyle. 

Two vols. roy. 4to, cloth, with Coloured 

Plates. Reduced to 5/. 5s. 



A Visit to the Suez Canal 
Works. 

By George Percy Badger. 
Demy 8vo. With Map. Price 2s. 6d. 

The Defence of Lucknow. 

By Captain Thomas F. Wilson. 

Sixth Thousand. With Plan. Small 

post 8vo. Price 2*. 6d. 

PRIZE ESSAYS. 
By B. A. Irving. 

The Theory of Caste, 

8vo. 5s. cloth. 

The Commerce of India 
with Europe. 

Post Svo. Price 7s. 6d. cloth. 

Moohummudan Law of 

Sale. 

By N. B. E. Baillie, Esq. 

8vo. Price 14s. cloth. 

Moohummudan Law of 
Inheritance. 

By N. B. E. Baillie, Esq. 
8vo. Price 8s. cloth. 

The Cauvery, Kistnah, and 
Godavcry : 

Being a Report on the Works con- 
structed on those Rivers, for the 
Irrigation of Provinces in the Pre- 
sidency of Madras. 

| By Col. B. Baird Smith, F.G.S. 
\ Demy Svo, with 19 Plans. 28s. clotX 

Land Tax of India. 

According to the Moohummudan Law. 

By N. B. E. Baillie, Esq. 

8vo. Price 6s. cloth. 



Smith, Elder § Co., 65, Cornhill, London. 



FICTION 



Winifred's Wooing. 
By Georgiana M. Craih. One Vol. 

A Bad Beginning : A Story 

of a French Marriage. Two Vols. 

A Loss Gained. 

By Philip Cresswell. One Vol. 

Carr of Carrlyon. 

By Hamilton Aide. 
Author of " Rita," &c. 3 vols. 

Warp and Woof. 

By Holme Lee. Three Vols. 

Who Breaks — Fays. 

In Two Vols. 
By the Author of" Cousin Stella." 

The Wortlebank Diary : 

With Stories from Kathie Brando's 

Portfolio. 

By Holme Lee. Three Vols. 

OvertheCliffs. 

By Mrs. Chanter, 
Author of " Eerny Combes." 2 vols. 

Lovel the Widower. 

By W. M. Thackeray. 

With six Illustrations. Post 8vo. 

Price 65. cloth. 

Esmond. 

By W. M. Thackeray. 

Third Edition, crown Svo. Gs. cloth. 

The Adventures of Philip 

on his Way through the World; 

shewing who Robbed him, who 

Helped him, and who Passed him by. 

By W. M. Thaclceray. 

Author of "Esmond," Vanity Eair," 



The Cotton Lord. 

By Herbert Glyn. Two Vols. 

Said and Done. One Vol. 



Scarsdale ; 

Or, Life on the Lancashire and York- 
shire Border Thirty Years ago. 3 vols. 

Agnes of Sorrento. 

By Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

Post 8vo. Price 7 s. 6d. cloth. 

Herbert Chauncey: 

A Man more Sinned against than 

Sinning. 

By Sir Arthur Hallam Elton, Bart. 

In 3 vols. 

Hills and Plains. Two Vol?. 
The Firstborn. 

By the Author of a My Lady." 
Three volumes. 

The Tra^d^of Life. 

By John II. Brenten. Two Vols. 

Framley Parsonage. 

By Anthony Trollope, 

Illustrated by J. E. Millais, R.A. 

Three Vols. Post 8vo, 21s. cloth. 

Also a cheap Edition. 1 vol., post Svo. 

Price 55. cloth. 

Phantastes : 

A Eaerie Romance for Men and 

Women. 

By George Macdonald. 

Post Svo. Price 10s. 6d. cloth. 

The FoofoFQuality. 

By Henry Brooke. 
New and Revised Edition, with Biogra- 
phical Preface by the Rev. CiiaS. 
Kingsley, Rector of Eversley. 



" Virginians," &c. Three Volumes, j Two vols., post 8vo, with Portrait of 
Post Svo. the Author, price 21s. 



14 



New and Standard Works published by 



CHEAP EDITIOMS OF POPULAR WORKS, 



Against Wind and Tide. 

By Holme Lee. 
Author of " Sylvan Holt's Daughter," 
"Kathie Brande," &.c. A New and 
Cheaper Edition. Fcap 8vo. Price 
25. 6d. cloth. 

Lavinia. Pri ce 2s. 6d. cloth. 
Sylvan Holt's Daughter. 

By Holme Lee. Price 25. 6c?. cloth. 

The Autobiography of 
Leigh Hunt. 

Price 25. %d. cloth. 

WOUKS OF THE BRONTE SISTERS. 
Price 25. 6c?. eacli vol. 

By Currer Bell. 
The Professor. 

To which are added the Poems of 
Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Now 
first collected. 

Jane Eyre. 

Shirley. 

Villette. 

Wuthering Heights and 

Agnes Grey. 

By Ellis and Acton Bell. 

"With Memoir by Ccrrer Bell. 

Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 

By Acton Bell. 

Life of Charlotte Bronte 

(Currer Bell). 

By Mrs. Gaskell. 

Cheap edition. 2s. 6c?. cloth, 

Lectures on the English 
Humourists 

Of the Eighteenth Century. 

By W. M. Thackeray. 

Price 25. 6 c?. cloth. 

The Town. By Leigh Hunt. 
With 45 Engravings. 2s. 6c?. cloth. 



Transformation. 

By Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
Price 25. 6c?. cloth. 

Kathie Brande: 

The Fireside History of a Quiet Life. 
By Holme Lee. Price 25. 6c?. cloth. 

Below the Surface. 

I By Sir A. H. Elton, Bart., M.P. 
Price 25. 6cf. cloth. 

British India. 

By Harriet Martineau. 2s. 6d. cloth. 

Italian Campaigns of 

General Bonaparte. 

By George Hooper. 
With a Map. Price 25. 6c?. cloth. 

Deer brook. 

By Harriet Martineau. 25.6c?. cloth . 

Tales of the Colonies. 

By Charles Rowcroft. 2s. 6d. cloth. 

A Lost Love. 

By Ashford Ozven. 2s. cloth. 

Bomantic Tales 

(Including "Avillion"). 

By the Author of " John Halifax, 

Gentleman." 2s. 6d. cloth. 

Domestic Stories. 

By the same Author. 2s. 6c?. cloth. 

After Dark. 

By Wilkie Collins. 2s. 6c?. cloth. 
School for Fathers. 

By Talbot Gwynne. 2s. cloth. 

Paul Ferroll. 

Price 25. cloth. 



Smith, Elder 8f Co., 65, Cornhill, London. 

JUVENILE AND EDUCATIONAL. 



15 



The Parents' Cabinet 

Of Amusement and Instruction for 
Young Persons. 

New Edition, revised, in Twelve Shil- 
ling Volumes, with numerous Illus- 
trations. 

*** The work is now complete in 4 vols. 
extra cloth, gilt edges, at 3s. 6d. 
each ; or in 6 vols, extra cloth, gilt 
edges, at 2s. 6d. each. 

Every volume is complete in itself, 
and sold separately. 

By the Author of " Round the Fire," &c. 

Bound the Fire : 

Six Stories for Young Readers. 

Square 16mo, with Eour Illustrations. 

Price 2s. 6d. cloth. ' 

Unica : 

A Story for a Sunday Afternoon. 
With Four Illustrations. 2s. 6d. cloth. 



Old 



th< 



Gingerbread and 
Schoolboys. 

With Eour Coloured Plates. 2s. 6c?. cl. 

Willie's Birthday: 

Showing how a Little Boy did what he 

Liked, and how he Enjoyed it. 

With Four Illustrations. 2s. cloth. 

Willie's Kest: 

A Sunday Story. 
With Four Illustrations. 2s. cloth. 

Uncle Jack, the Fault 
Killer. 

With Four Illustrations. 2s. 6d. cloth. 

Philo-Socrates. 
Parts T. & II. " Among the Boys." 
Part III., IV. — 'Among the Teachers." 

By William Ellis. 
Post 8vo. Price Is. each. 



Legends from Fairy Land. 

By Holme Lee, 
Author of " Kathie Brande," " Sylvan 

Holt's Daughter," &c. 
With Eight Illustrations. 3s. 6c?. cloth . 

The Wonderful Adven- 
tures of Tuflongbo and Lis 
Elfin Company in their Journey 
with Little Content, through the 
Enchanted Forest. 

By Holme Lee, 
Author of " Legends from Fairy 

Land," &c. 

With Eight Illustrations. Fcap 8vo. 

Price 3s. 6d. cloth. 

The King of the Golden 
River ; 

Or, the Black Brothers. 

By John Ruskin, M.A. 

Fourth Edition, with 22 Illustrations 

Kichard Doyle. Price 2s. 6d. 

Elementary Works on 
Social Economy. 

By William Ellis. 
Uniform in foolscap 8vo, half-bound. 

I— OUTLINES OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. U.M. 
II— PROGRESSIVE LESSONS IN SOCIAL 

SCIENCE. 
Ill— INTRODUCTION TO THE SOCIAL 

SCIENCES. 2s. 
TV-OUTLINES OE THE UNDERSTANDING. 

V.-WHAT AM I? WHERE AM I? WHAT 
OUGHT I TO DO ? &c. Is. sewed. 

Ehymes for Little Ones. 

16 Illustrations. Is. 6c?. cl, gilt edges. 

Stories from the Parlour 
Printing Press. 

By the Authors of the " Parent's 

Cabinet." 

Fcap 8vo. Price 2s. cloth. 

Juvenile Miscellany. 

Six Engravings, Price 2s. 6^. eicti. 



10 Works published by Smith, Elder § Co., 65, CoriJiill, London. 

RECENT POETRY. 



The Piccolomini. 

Translated from the German of 
Schiller. 

By W. R. Walhington. 
Fcap Svo, price 5s. cloth. 

Cache-Caclie. 

By William Davy Watson, M.A. 
Fcap 8vo. Price 45. cloth. 

Poems. 

By the Rev. George E. Maunscll. 
Fcap Svo. Price 5s. cloth. 

Christ's Company, and 
other Poems. 

By Richard Watson Dixon, M.A. 
Fcap 8vo, price 5s. cloth. 

Sybil, and other Poems. 

By John Lyttelton. 
Fcap 8vo, price As. cloth. 

Stories in Verse for the 

Street and Lane : 

By Mrs. Sew ell. 

3rd Thousand. Post Svo. Cloth, Is. 



Edwin and Ethelburga : 

A Drama. 

By Frederick W. Wyon. 

Fcap 8vo. Price 4s. cloth. 

A Man's Heart : a Poem, 

By Dr. Charles MacJcay. 
Post 8vo. Price 5s. cloth. 

Hannibal ; a Drama. 

Fcap Svo. Price 5s. cloth. 

Shelley ; and other Poems. 

By John Alfred Langford. 
Fcap 8vo. Price 5s. cloth. 

Isabel Gray; or, The Mis- 
tress Didn't Know. 
By Mrs. Seivell, 
Post Svo. Cloth. Gilt edges. Is. 

Homely Ballads 

For the Working Man's Fireside. 

By Mary Sewell. 

13th Thousand. Post 8vo. Cloth, h 

Memories of Merton. 

By John Bruce Norton. 
Fcap Svo. Price 5s. cloth. 



THE COENHILL MAGAZINE: 

Price One Shilling Monthly, with Illustrations. 

Volumes I., II., III., IV., and V., each containing 768 pages of Letterpress, 
with 12 Illustrations, and numerous Vignettes and Diagrams, are published, 
handsomely bound in Embossed Cloth. Price 7s. 6d. each. 

For the convenience of Subscribers, the Embossed Clotu Covers for each 
Volume are sold separately, price One Shilling. 

Reading Covers for separate Numbers have also been prepared, price 
Sixpence in plain Cloth, or One Shilling and Sixpence in French Morocco. 



Loidon : Printed by Smith, Eldeb and Co., Little Green Arbour Court, Old Bailer, E.C. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2006 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



